The global equipment market for in-building wireless system, including active distributed antenna systems (DAS), passive DAS, and repeaters, is expected to grow to $10 billion in 2025, according to ABI Research.
Yet, out of this market, 5G in-building wireless equipment will account for only 5% or $509 million in 2025, due to one year or more delay of 5G deployments indoors and in venues compared to outdoor 5G deployments starting from 2020, the research firm says.
“As 5G nears full specification, mobile network operators will face challenges for indoor mobile coverage, including signal propagation, next-generation fronthaul/backhaul, and massive MIMO,” says Nick Marshall, research director at ABI Research.
According to Marshall, early 5G deployments indoors and in venues will be a migration building on the features of LTE-Advanced and LTE-Advanced Pro. This will happen technology by technology and frequency by frequency, avoiding costly ‘rip and replace’ style deployments, the analyst notes.
Marshall further points out that future 5G networks - which will comprise of a combination of different cell types and access technologies to seamlessly adapt to an array of use cases and applications - will rely on network functions virtualization (NFV) and mobile edge computing (MEC) to alter the architecture and topology of the RAN by leveraging telco data centers to virtualize signal processing in the cloud.
NFV migrates cellular signal processing to a remote telco data center, while MEC, in a countervailing trend, migrates IT compute and storage to the network edge within the building or venue for low latency use cases and applications.
With 5G standards yet to be finalized, many equipment vendors are actively researching and developing 5G equipment with a variety of approaches. These companies include Nokia with its AirFrame/AirScale Radio Access, Ericsson with its ERS, and CommScope with its OneCell.