Three Launches Glasgow Urban Small Cell Project With Mavenir

UK operator Three is looking to tackle inner-city network congestion with a series of small cell deployments around Glasgow, using Mavenir hardware and software.

Three gathered journalists to the Glasgow City Chambers on a brisk February morning to unveil the project, which was described as a trial to improve urban connectivity by deploying a series of small cells on lampposts around the city, as an alternative to new macro sites.

Three UK’s Chief Network Officer, Iain Milligan, gave a presentation in which he pointed out that if you go to one point of Glasgow your 5G reception will be ‘exceptional’ and at another point it will be non-existent.

Describing the project, Milligan told Telecoms.com: “It’s part of the government’s Open Networks Initiative. We put forward a proposal to challenge every aspect of what the government wanted to achieve… which is Open RAN in a multi-vendor environment in a dense urban area. So we just said Glasgow has the highest variety of multivendor that we have in a small location, dense, urban – let’s go for it. So that’s what we’re going to do, we’re going to deploy around 51 small cells in the centre of Glasgow targeted for traffic offload on Open RAN.”