Spot our 1000th small cell!

[Martin-O2]

Hey everyone, 

We’ve just celebrated a significant delivery milestone, as we integrated our 1000th Outdoor Small cell in London. This is a fantastic achievement for a relatively new product, and shows great work from the Delivery and Radio performance teams to identify and deliver key capacity capability for our customers in targeted locations.

The small cells layer is boosting the 4G capacity by between 10-20% in deployed areas in London, allowing more capacity, more users of the service and an increased user throughput. As some of our Live Small Cells have seen a rapid increase in traffic carried since lockdown eased, we are now moving into adding more carriers/capacity on these high demand Small Cells.

The Network team are continuing to work hard on delivering more Small Cell capability inside and outside of London and across multiple technology layers, which provides us with a great platform to hit more milestones and deliver greater benefit to our customers.

We use Small Cells in city centres like London, as lots of buildings make it harder for radio signals to travel as far, meaning that each cell site will have a smaller coverage footprint. Small Cells are shoe-box sized masts with a small coverage footprint. They are well suited to highly built up and busy areas where masses of people are trying to access the network at the same time, as they provide lots of capacity for a small location.

And sometimes, if a new building is built after a cell site has been built, it can stop mobile signals from passing through and interferes with the coverage in the surrounding area. So we may have to look to build a new cell site or investigate other local solutions.

Got any questions on small cells? Or want to know more about any of the other network technologies we use to improve the customer experience? Let us know below! 

[pgn]

I think I have spotted it:

Did I win the Internet? 

[TallTrees]

Well done @pgn
No deterioration in your signals🤣👍

[Anonymous]

I wonder if there’s a list of how many cells there are in towns and cities around the UK? I’m sure 1000 are needed in London, but I’m also sure we could use a few more elsewhere!

[Martin-O2]

A great question @Anonymous! I'll see if I can find out for you. 

[Anonymous]

Thanks!

[pgn]

I take it this one drew a blank? 😖

[Anonymous]

I'd love to know.