Stadiums around the world are being built or upgraded with the latest information and communications technologies to address the connectivity of smartphones fans bring to the venue. In Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the King Abdullah Sports Stadium, which is also known as the Al Jawhara Stadium, is deploying Nokia's centralized RAN technology in collaboration with Zain (News - Alert) Saudi Arabia to improve network speeds and quality of experience.
The trend in high network capacity installation or upgrades in new and existing stadiums has been increasing as more fans bring their mobile devices to watch games or other entertainment events. In Saudi Arabia, Nokia (News - Alert) has improved the way more than 60,000 fans share content with up to 50 percent faster upload speed, which, according to officials, has resulted in a 31 percent increase of uplink traffic from prior events.
“The more people upload, the more the network becomes congested, so we have deployed Nokia's Centralized RAN technology to boost the uplink speed for fans while also improving their smartphone battery life,” said Sultan Abdulaziz AlDeghaither, Chief Technology Officer at Zain Saudi Arabia.
The improvement in speed and uplink traffic was made possible after Zain installed Nokia's Centralized RAN technology and deployed LTE base stations within the stadium to optimize bandwidth and remove uplink congestion in the 1800 MHz bands. According to Zain, not only has this improved the performance of the connectivity, but the batteries in smartphones are more efficient because it takes less power to upload content.
“Our Centralized RAN technology helps operators like Zain Saudi Arabia address the network congestion caused by bandwidth-hungry applications and services at large venues and stadiums. In Jeddah, our planning and optimization services have ensured that the technology delivered as promised, maximizing the return on Zain's investment and working seamlessly with its existing network,” said Ali Al Jitawi, head of the Zain Saudi Arabia customer team at Nokia.
Nokia Centralized RAN maximizes spectral efficiency and use to give more than 200 percent average uplink throughput gain while at the same time getting rid of cell edge degradation to give ten-fold increase in cell edge uplink speeds. It does this through software that uses clusters of LTE (News - Alert) base stations to turn the interference into useful traffic. The best signal from 12 receivers is selected after the base station uplinks signal from multiple cell stations.
Edited by
Alicia Young
