Bringing 5G indoors has long been a challenge, with legacy DAS systems proving costly and complex. Ericsson is changing the game with its Radio Dot System, a modern digital solution that simplifies deployment, reduces infrastructure needs, and enhances performance. By supporting multiple operators on a single radio, enterprises can improve connectivity without the burden of additional equipment.
Ericsson’s solution unlocks new capabilities such as private networks, indoor positioning, and network slicing. Whether for public safety, seamless customer experiences, or business-critical applications, the Radio Dot System offers a smarter, more efficient approach to 5G indoors.
Alejandro Piñero:
All right, Matt, thanks for having us this morning here at the Ericsson stand at MWC Barcelona, and I'm excited to hear all about neutral host with you. Why don't we start with what's driving businesses to invest in the technology today?
Matt Addicks:
Great, and thanks for joining us, right. So when we came to Mobile World Congress, we were on a mission to provide an enterprise perspective across all of our technology solutions here in the Ericsson booth in the front here.
And from a neutral host perspective, enterprises are investing in neutral host and bringing 5G indoors for two main reasons I would say, right? First and foremost is public safety. So if there's an injury, if there's a fire and you can't call for emergency services, number one, it's a safety challenge of course. But the second is it's actually a liability for the building owner. So they are incentivized to really invest in this technology.
The second is around experience. A lot can probably assume this, but here's a great example. The Firad here, or international airports, they're tier one venues that have been, technology has been invested in those venues for some time now, right? But if I go to my hotel, cell service is virtually non-existent, and what do I do? I hop on the unsecure Wi-Fi right away. Everybody else is doing the same exact thing and the network is taxed. So they're not really being able to call home to do the work that they need, right? So it's really a challenge from an experience perspective as well.
Another note to that is a lot of organizations are driving business more digitally as well, right? For things like wayfinding to find things inside of a retail location or see where you're going to your gate inside of an airport. So there's a lot more digital that's happening, digital experiences that are happening inside of organizations as well. So those are two of the main drivers, I would say, for bringing 5G indoors, and we're happy to lead the charge there.
Alejandro Piñero:
Great. And so can you talk to us a little bit about how those deployments are currently taking place? How are they handled and [inaudible 00:01:57] out?
Matt Addicks:
Sure. Yeah. So this has been done for years, right? 5G has been brought indoor for years, but it's been done with what's called an active legacy DAS system, or distributed antenna system. And these systems are, they've worked for years, but they're very complex, they're very costly and they're very time-consuming to deploy. There's a lot of different components to them.
And one of the main reasons for that is because there's some analog-to-digital conversion that needs to happen, right? And to support multiple operators in any given venue, you have to deploy a lot of equipment. For essentially for every CSP or carrier, you have to deploy another parallel network, right? If you want more performance, you have to add more infrastructure. That increases costs, that increases complexity, right? And that's something that enterprises really what I've learned is they're pretty frustrated with, right? So they want to worry about their business, right, not necessarily how solutions are really architected from a complexity perspective. And we're doing it differently, right?
Alejandro Piñero:
So can you expand on that then? How is Ericsson taking that a different approach?
Matt Addicks:
Sure. So we have a solution which we've coined the DAS killer, right? And that's our Radio Dot System. So the Radio Dot System is a much more modern approach to solving five-G coverage issues inside of and directly around buildings, right? So from one single radio, actually, you can support multiple operators up to four operators from one single radio without having to deploy any additional infrastructure. On top of that, it natively has the performance that many businesses require with up to four by four MIMP.
Whereas if you wanted that kind of performance from a DAS perspective, you would have to deploy more infrastructure. There's more complexity and more cost there. On top of that, as I mentioned before, it's a completely modern digital solution. It takes a CAT-6 cable or hybrid fiber cable if you need to make some longer runs for a larger type deployment. And then in addition to that, also you can take advantage of a lot of the inherent capabilities that come with our solution with the Radio Dot System.
So one thing you can do, which is actually pretty cool, is you can add on a private network to that. So you can support three operators and add on a private network for business critical type applications. Additionally, we can do things like indoor precise positioning for business critical type assets. You can take advantage of red cap, take advantage of slicing, right? There's some things that are really specific to Ericsson and we believe are differentiators, but there's some other things that you can take advantage of without having to build out additional infrastructure and add to the complexity for the businesses. So we're happy to bring 5G to the enterprise, especially inside and around their buildings.
Alejandro Piñero:
Brilliant. Well, Matt, thanks again for taking the time to give us a little snippet of that story. It's great to hear everything that's going on here in the Ericsson booth. And best of luck.
Matt Addicks:
Thanks for joining us. Yeah.