Ericsson, one of the companies likely to provide 5G technology to Nigerian operators has teamed with US-based laser company PowerLight Technologies to power what the pair claimed was the first fully wireless 5G base station, marking a major milestone in the vendor’s efforts to improve and deploy new technology for RAN sites.
The news came on the heels of a disclosure by the Minister of Digital Economy, Dr. Isa Pantami that Nigeria plans to deploy 5G cellular networks in January 2022, according to a recent announcement by the Minister of Digital Economy, Dr. Isa Pantami.
Pantami made the announcement at a town hall meeting in Maiduguri, Borno state.
Pantami explained that the need to deploy the modern system was due to the over 50,000 telecommunications sites across the country and about 16,000 outages recorded by mobile network operators (MTN, Glo, Airtel, 9mobile) between January 2021 and July 2021.
The Nigerian Communications Commission ( NCC) has since expressed its readiness to meet the federal government deadline.
In the Ericsson statement reported by Mobile World Live, the company explained that the proof-of-concept demo was achieved in Seattle, US, using optical beaming, a laser-based technology that converts electricity into high-intensity light which is then “captured and transformed” to electricity at the radio base station.
During the demo, no wires were connected to the site from the street power grid network, and no onsite power generation was involved, while the base station site was powerless until it connected wirelessly “over the air” through a laser beam.
The power was distributed to an Ericsson 5G mmWave base station, with PowerLight’s laser technology transmitting hundreds of watts over hundreds of metres through the air.
“The ability to safely transfer power across distances without having to be connected to the power grid eliminates one of the big obstacles we have when building new cell sites,” claimed Kevin Zvokel, head of networks at Ericsson North America.
The two companies added they aimed to further explore and develop innovative 5G solutions aimed at enhancing the speed and flexibility of network deployment in diverse environments.
