Cellium’s EdgeAir is an end-to-end antenna-extension subsystem comprising a Base Unit (BU) that distributes the analog RF signal to various Remote Units (RUs) mounted within the indoor space. The analog RF signal is distributed via the BU to multiple RUs over existing in-wall copper cables such as CATx or coax. The BU consists of antenna ports that connect back to any third-party RAN or WiFi signal source via a standard RF cable.
The latest Cellular and WiFi communication RAT are designed to transmit wide bandwidth, on high frequencies and high modulation rates that require high SNR and lower latency. Furthermore, each Cellular cell or Wi-Fi Access Point occupies larger parts of the available spectrum, dramatically increasing congestion and dropping the SNR/SIR, resulting in rate drop and low spectrum efficiency in dense indoor deployments.
Intense wireless spectrum utilization has forced regulators to allocate new frequencies for 5G and WiFi 6/6E standards in higher mid-band spectrum (usually above 3.3GHz). These frequencies suffer high penetration loss that significantly drop the SNR and consequently shorten the system coverage. Current indoor systems have significant high cost in order to distribute this signal and achieve high performance and throughput.
In order to meet the technical requirements of high frequency and high bandwidth radio technologies, traditional indoor cellular coverage deployments require significant investment in infrastructure such as RF cables, fibers, radios, and installations for each new technology. Furthermore, most deployments are not future-proof and requires a rip-and-replace to support new bands and protocols.
Cellular 5G-NR and WIFI 6/6E SoC consist of MIMO and higher modulation rates that require much higher processing power compared to older cellular or WiFi technology SOCs. The number of RF chains are doubled or quadrupled to keep up with the latest advances in wireless technologies, increasing the system cost.