DAS solution provider TE Connectivity (News - Alert) this week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is promoting a new 10gbps optical transport product that it says can effectively move large amounts of bandwidth from a base station to a venue.
Tony Lefebvre, director of product management at TE Connectivity, explains that venues are running out of real estate for baseband processing equipment, so this 10gig solution can deliver a higher level of aggregation by combining multiple bands into a single pipe. The Serial Link Combiner chassis can support four 10gbps links; each 10gbps link supports up to 225mHz of RF spectrum transported over a single 10gbps fiber pair.
On a separate front, TE Connectivity also recently announced plans to bring baseband capability to its DAS head-end, says John Spindler (News - Alert), director of product management for low power/in-building solutions. That will save network operators money in terms of the space required for the head-end, he explains. TE Connectivity expects to announce an OEM partner for this solution shortly. The product is expected to be generally available in the fourth quarter.
Lefebvre and Spindler add that TE Connectivity is also making strides in delivering higher power solutions for both in-building and outside products.
TE Connectivity at Mobile World Congress (News - Alert) continued to push the messaging that DAS is an ideal technology for small cell deployments. Spindler says the company continues to deploy DAS small cell deployments at stadium and campuses including the University of Phoenix and the US Airways stadiums and universities including MIT (News - Alert) and Yale.
While one TMCnet source says DAS is too expensive to be used for small cell deployments, TE Connectivity retorts that DAS is a good match because it can address high-density applications and enables service providers to leverage all of their frequency assets. Spindler adds that DAS centralizes bandwidth and simulcasts its availability to multiple radios so service providers can ensure that less bandwidth is idle. AT&T (News 
- Alert) has announced its intention to deploy more than 1000 DAS systems, and Verizon has been similarly aggressive in its stated DAS deployment plans, says Spindler.
Edited by Brooke Neuman
