Don’t count the space, make it count!

The showroom was full of clever designs that would optimize every inch of space. Davide spotted modular furniture that could transform his new home, providing hidden storage compartments and maximizing the use of limited areas by using loft beds with built-in storage and folding tables with compact chairs for the dining area. Antonio browsed a broad range of  options to reduce the power consumption in his home, from smart lighting solutions to create a cozy ambience to energy-efficient appliances and smart home devices that would enable him to control lighting and temperature with a minimum of effort. 

As they browsed, Antonio and Davide realized that the store was literally teeming with solutions to save valuable floor space and to minimize energy waste. At first glance they hadn’t noticed it - when you’re not looking for something specific, a table is a table and a lamp is a lamp - but when looking more closely, these items on the shelves and in the showroom revealed themselves to offer so much more.   

But engineers will be engineers, and it wasn’t long before Antonio made the connection to how the need for effective utilization of space and energy is growing well beyond households and into a variety of industrial activities – such as the mobile networks they were using check prices and send pictures to their partners as they sought to find the optimal solutions for their needs.

While deploying radio networks following the Centralized RAN paradigm, telecom operators have similar needs when it comes to space and energy efficiency, and they are also concerned about the footprint for their network hubs.

Ericsson Fronthaul 6626 and Fronthaul 6683 can efficiently help to overcome this challenge. On the surface, they look like any other single rack unit “pizza boxes” – look a little closer and you will discover that they are market leaders in terms of density of functionalities and energy efficiency, allowing the deployment of active and passive optical fronthaul solutions even when space and power supply are limited.

For customers who prefer an active fronthaul solution that can work as a demarcation point between the transport and radio domains, the Fronthaul 6626 is the perfect solution. In just one rack unit, this transponder offers the highest port density with up to 18 “grey” to colored optics conversion: 12 at 10G and six at 25G. Thanks to its design with pluggable expansion cassettes, it can also integrate DWDM filters, combining in one rack unit the complete functionalities of controller, transponders and filters - all that is needed to efficiently implement and manage baseband centralization in a C-RAN hub.

Fronthaul 6626

For customers who prefer a passive fronthaul solution, seamlessly integrated in the equipment practice of RAN sites with zero extra power consumption, then the Fronthaul 6683 hits the target, and again it does it in just one rack unit. This passive filter box offers leading modularity and great scalability, allowing for the connection of up to eight antenna poles and up to 72 radio services. It can scale towards supporting many fibers, either going to different sites or in parallel, to increase point-to-point capacity towards a single site while saving precious space thanks to the architecture based on four independent pluggable cassettes that can be added at any time, without restrictions.  

Fronthaul 6683

Whether you’re trying to effectively and efficiently furnish a small house, or to squeeze a CRAN hub into a small central office, even a small space can be rendered both functional and environmentally friendly if you look closely enough at the available solutions and make the right choices!

Further reading

Optical fronthaul