Concert Deployment
Pivotal worked with an operator to enhance mmWave performance at the Sea.Hear.Now festival in New Jersey. With over 40,000 attendees capacity was a concern and the operator had deployed two Cells on Wheels (COWs) to supplement existing small cells and macro sites covering the area.
To demonstrate 5G’s capability they showcased multiple technology demos. One demo was at a viewing deck located between two stages on either end of the beach. Viewers could put on headphones and get high fidelity streams directly from the soundboard on either stage, switching between them as they wished. A Front Row Experience without needing to be in the front row.
To work successfully the system needed very low latency and consistent uplink and downlink bandwidth to keep the audio in sync with what viewers were seeing on stage. At the soundboard the system needed a minimum of 30Mbps in the uplink at all times. On the viewing deck the devices (Samsung and Apple 5G smartphones with amazing headphones attached) needed consistent high-bandwidth downlink service.
This environment is very different from what you would generally use a repeater for — extending service to an area that previously didn’t have any. The festival area is blanketed with coverage from many sites, but what about when you need consistent high bandwidth in a small area? Testing at both showed that service was generally good, but could vary wildly as the UE’s switched between multiple serving beams and gNB’s.
Pivot 5G Repeaters were deployed to ensure we mapped capacity from overlapping cells to different areas. With two sites both covering the soundboard, crowd, and viewing deck we needed to ensure the VIP devices (the soundboard sending the audio stream and the smartphones receiving it) were served by different gNB’s (Fig. 1).
To do this, we used repeaters to create a local, dominant server, taking advantage of the beamforming inherent to mmWave devices. After deployment service went from good, but inconsistent as devices bounced between beams and gNBs to excellent and consistent with the dominant beams provided by the Pivots.
- The Soundboard went from peak uplink speeds of ~90Mbps to consistent speeds around 260Mbps!
- The Viewing Deck went from speeds of 500Mbps – 2.6Gbps (depending on location) to consistent speeds of 2-3Gbps across the entire area!
