Marty Zimmerman of Commscope discusses how the Mosaic platform’s combined passive-active antennas help solve the tower dilemma for mobile network operators in the race to add new bands and technologies.
Alejandro Pinero:
All right. Hello everyone. And welcome to another Fierce Wireless Digital Interview. My name is Alejandro Pinero here from the Fierce Team, and I have a great guest for you today. I'm joined by Marty Zimmerman, engineering fellow CTO for North America for the outdoor wireless networks. Marty, welcome to Fierce Telecom.
Martin Zimmerman:
Alejandro Pinero:
So Marty, before we dig into the topic at hand today, in 15,20 seconds, can you tell us a little bit about your role within CommScope and what you look after?
Martin Zimmerman:
Sure. So I'm in the CTO office, so focusing on forward looking strategy, and that is for the outdoor wireless networks business sector, which basically does everything except the radio related to having an outdoor wireless network. So we do steel, cabinets, power, antennas, filters, transmission lines both coax and fiber. So basically again, everything but the radio.
Alejandro Pinero:
Plenty there without the radio to think about already, I'm sure. Well, Marty, so we spoke actually recently during a Fierce Telecom podcast and very excited to have you back to dig a bit deeper into Mosaic. So after we launched that podcast, we got a lot of questions about it. So let's start at the top here for those that didn't have the chance to listen in. What exactly is Mosaic?
Martin Zimmerman:
Mosaic is a passive active solution. So specifically it is a passive antenna which you might use to support your FDD bands, your legacy 800, 900 megahertz, your 2 gigahertz, that has the ability such that you can place a 3.5 gigahertz, massive MIMO antenna behind the Mosaic, so that it's all mounted on a single type. So it's a very compact solution for implementing your upgrade to 5g.
Alejandro Pinero:
So when you think about the challenges that the cell operators and carriers are facing, what are the benefits then of deploying the Mosaic platform?
Martin Zimmerman:
So for some operators and then for some sites, it's absolutely enabling. They're depending on the operator. They're going to have a certain number of sites where they get exactly one position and they can only implement what they can put in that one position. And so Mosaic gives them a way to add the 3.5 gigahertz in a massive MIMO format along with all of their existing bands. Now in addition to that, there are a lot of sites out there that maybe have two or three pipes where it's not an absolute requirement, but it does provide benefits such as reductions in wind loading and also may allow you to avoid costly structural upgrades to either the sector frame or the site as a whole.
Alejandro Pinero:
I guess it's related to your answer just now, but why then develop Mosaic? What's the story? What was the background in terms of CommScope deciding to develop this platform?
Martin Zimmerman:
So for me, Mosaic goes back to a customer visit I made in Europe in 2016. And the customer said, "Look, 50 to 80% of our sites, we cannot deploy 3.5 gigahertz massive MIMO, unless we have an all in one solution." He said, "We've got one position and it's usually on a rooftop, which means we're height limited, so we can't vertically stack separate solutions on a single pipe." And he said literally 50 to 80% of their sites fell in that category. And so that's what started us moving in that direction.
The other feedback we started hearing is that our customers really wanted a solution that would work with all of the radios they wanted to deploy. They weren't as excited about the idea of having say a separate solution for each one of their radio vendors. And another critical part of it is they wanted a portfolio. So they don't just want a single solution because any given operator operates in multiple jurisdictions with different zoning restrictions, and so if you can put in an eight footer, you want to put in an eight footer to get the maximum gain. And if you're in say a US coastal city that only allows five foot antennas, you need a solution that's going to work there as well.
Alejandro Pinero:
I assume a lot of the challenges as well in these sites come from just the geography and the weather conditions and everything around the environment. Can you talk a little bit about Mosaic's effects on wind loading?
Martin Zimmerman:
Sure. So the precise impact on wind loading is going to depend on what's on the site initially, and so what your comparison is. What we can say is if you, for example, have a site where you currently have two 20 inch wide antennas on separate pipes, if you look at the impact of putting the massive MIMO on a separate third pipe versus putting the massive MIMO on the back of a 20 inch Mosaic which would replace one of those regular passives, you're typically looking at a 20% reduction in wind loading. And again, it depends on the exact size of the massive MIMO radio. It depends on whether you're deploying five foot passes or eight foot passes, but it's going to be somewhere range.
Alejandro Pinero:
Marty as a parting thought here for those folks that are watching this today and are thinking about their own assets and their own network that they're running or managing, can you talk about Mosaic and does it work with any radio? Are there any restrictions? How does it work?
Martin Zimmerman:
We are designing Mosaic to work with any radio. We will not go out and say it's radio agnostic because there are certain steps one would go through to validate that the radio works with our Mosaic package. But the idea is that it should be able to work with 64T, 32T even 8T if someone wants to do that. And it should work between different families, different manufacturers. So the goal is that a given operator can deploy this product with all of their radio OEMs.
Alejandro Pinero:
Well, Marty, thanks for joining us again. Just as a reminder to those of you watching, if you want a lot more detail on the CommScope Mosaic platform, you can listen in to the Fierce Telecom podcast that we did just a few months ago with Marty. And if not, of course, reach out to the CommScope team. I'm sure they'll be happy to help you. Marty, thanks for joining us. Always a pleasure to have you.
Martin Zimmerman:
It was great being here. Thanks a lot, Alejandro.