If you are travelling to a sports stadium inside India or maybe anywhere in the world, be ready for one thing — loss of network connectivity or a bad network experience. This is because of network congestion inside the stadiums. Thousands of people are in the same area where most people are utilising the same company’s network for data-heavy applications such as sending high-res images and videos shot from their smartphones. Thus, most modern stadiums are now also coming with the facility of Wi-Fi and public hotspots to ensure that people don’t lose touch with internet connectivity inside stadiums.
How Can 5G Small Cells Help?
First of all, the sheer capacity of 5G networks would ensure that the mobile networks aren’t as congested as 4G, which will mean better speeds. But, to deliver a 5G coverage to everyone inside the stadium, communication service providers (CSPs) can leverage 5G small cells. These small cells can be placed below the sitting chairs of the crowd. Since they are very small, they can easily fit there. Companies such as Ericsson have already built products to solve this issue and are offering them to CSPs for deployment. Ericsson’s 5G small cells will help with the scaling capacity of the network and will offer an improved and consistent network experience to the users. It is worth noting that Ericsson had earlier partnered with Telefonica for offering 5G services at the famous Camp Nou football stadium in Barcelona. Ericsson’s Radio Dot System (small cells) utilised 3.5 GHz spectrum to deliver 5G services to people inside the football stadium. The issue with traditional coverage solutions is that they are not easy to scale and are not cost-effective either. But with the 5G small cells, CSPs and the sports authorities can work together across India and the globe to ensure that major sporting venues where thousands of fans come together to support their favourite team don’t lose network connectivity.
