PRESS RELEASE: [Makati, Philippines, February 22, 2019] Before 2019 Mobile World Congress, Smart Communications announced that they are building the 5G oriented DIS (Digital Indoor System) in Smart Tower, to provide ubiquitous high-quality user experience while supporting smooth evolution to 5G. This is a significant step to embrace the arrival of upcoming 5G era.

Smart Tower is a 36-story skyscraper in the heart of Makati CBD and is the headquarters of Smart Communications. Currently the indoor network are supported by DAS which provides 2G, 3G and LTE services. SMART Tower houses thousands of Smart employees and are in constant need of data services to fulfill both their professional and personal needs throughout the day. With a highly tech savvy workforce, a Digital Indoor System provide the best network in capacity and user experience. As SMART Tower also houses the Innovation Lab focusing on next generation technology and use cases such as 5G, the DIS will ensure that when needed, the DIS will smoothly evolve to support 5G network supporting eMBB, uRLLC and eMTC use cases.

The existing DAS networks have been strained to satisfy these service requirements. For example, DAS does not support smooth capacity expansion as reconstructions are required to introduce multi-antenna solutions, which is a key component to 5G. DAS also requires tremendous O&M efforts and takes a long time to construct, making it unsuitable to meet the requirements of fast deployment.

As one of Huawei’s DIS-based solutions, LampSite Pro is easy to deploy. It provides huge capacity, supports multi-mode multi-band applications, and E2E visualized O&M. These features give it unique strengths to tangibly improve coverage and eliminate blind holes in the offices scenario, helping provide ubiquitous MBB experience to end-users. Data obtained from a DIS deployment in one of the major entertainment arena demonstrated significant uplink and downlink traffic increment by 100+%, indicating an efficient release of long-suppressed traffic. The downlink rate at the user end was constant even with the increase of user traffic, with peak data rate of 300+Mbps recorded, showing a significantly improved user experience. Additionally, this digital indoor system has the capability to evolve into future-oriented 5G networks without the need for additional cabling.

Joachim Horn, Chief Technology and Information Advisor of PLDT and Smart, said: “Boosting our indoor coverage is part of the broader network improvement program of PLDT and Smart, which is focused on creating the best customer experience especially for data. Improving indoor coverage is important because people use their data heavily while inside buildings.”