Author
Nicolas Phily
The following blog post has been provided by A Nicolas Phily, Project Director and Philippe Jaillet, Radio Engineer at Orange. As with all CommScope-hosted blog posts, any opinions or comments below are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of CommScope.
Lyon is a big city. In fact, after Paris, it’s the second largest metropolitan area in all of France. With 200 million riders annually across the system’s 32 kilometers of railways, the Métro de Lyon is a daily part of life for the city’s busy population.
In today’s digital economy, passengers expect to have access to the Internet and to be able to make calls consistently while taking the train. The provision of mobile connectivity is no longer nice to have. It’s becoming a baseline requirement as cities look to the digital future of transportation and provide that seamless end to end journey experience, a must in today’s world.
To help provide reliable, scalable LTE connectivity throughout the underground system, the city of Lyon turned to Orange—and Orange turned to CommScope.
A four-part connectivity challenge
Over the years, we’ve come to trust CommScope to tackle challenging deployments, and the Lyon underground put us to the test. The requirements were many: the metro had to serve all four wireless operators; it had to be 5G-ready; it had to operate with low and medium-power equipment; and to top it all off, the deployment had to be completed in less than one year.
Investing in smart track-side infrastructure
CommScope had the answer in the Era™ DAS solution, a C-RAN architecture that is efficient to operate, agile and scalable, and 5G-ready right out of the box. Era is also operator-agnostic, providing seamless support for all four operators—or even more, should they emerge in the future. All it took was patching in at the BTS hotel just outside the metro to get all operator networks online.
Deployment strategy
We analyzed traffic patterns across the Lyon metro system and identified peak demand areas and times. Era’s MIMO support made it easy and economical to provide the scaled-up capacity these peak areas needed. As ridership grows, Era’s fiber infrastructure has the extra bandwidth to absorb the greater demand, and the scalability to enable 5G deployment.
A winning combination
The digital economy depends upon ‘always available’ fast and timely mobile connectivity. Users desire it and transportation companies must deliver this service and go beyond being a provider. To truly innovate, they must harness the power of digital mobile technology. Thanks to the combined innovation of Orange and CommScope, Lyon Metro is on the right track.
