Sequans Communications S.A. and Japan Radio Company, Ltd. (JRC) have developed a high-powered prototype CPE based on Sequans LTE Cat 6 chip technology that is being prepared for public safety.
The CPE was developed to operate on the 200 MHz frequency band—the band designated for public safety services in Japan — and includes an exceptionally high-powered radio front end to ensure very high quality communications performance. The new CPE and its advanced capabilities were successfully demonstrated to the Japanese government in February of 2018.
Hugues Waldburger, VP of Sequans’ Broadband Business Unit, said:
“We are proud to collaborate with JRC and pleased with the performance of this LTE CPE that has been developed to help public officials in Japan prepare communication services for public safety.”
“We adapted our technology to operate on the 170-202.5 MHz LTE band and to perform at higher than normal output power of 37 dBm in order to meet the requirements of this special communications project. Our collaboration with JRC has yielded excellent results with a full demonstration of all planned capabilities.”
“Our work with Sequans over the last year to develop this CPE has now come to fruition and we have achieved what we set out to do,” said JRC. “We had to meet very stringent RF specifications and we had to prove interoperability with infrastructure equipment, and at the end we have a very powerful and high performance CPE that meets all requirements.”
The prototype CPE complies with RF requirements for various profiles, including LTE, GSM-like, 1Rx, or 2Rx. During testing, the JRC/Sequans CPE outperformed using the very low LTE frequency band that enables better indoor penetration, while maintaining a reliable LTE communications link. The high Tx power, higher than the standard 3GPP power classes, enables cost-optimized network planning with larger cells.
The CPE is based on Sequans’ Cassiopeia LTE Cat 6 Platform, a member of Sequans’ StreamrichLTE product family for high performance devices. Cassiopeia complies with 3GPP Release 10 specifications and supports other Release 10 enhancements such as new MIMO schemes, enhanced inter-cell interference coordination (eICIC) schemes for heterogeneous networks (HetNets), and improvements to eMBMS (evolved multimedia broadcast multicast service) or LTE broadcast. Cassiopeia features Sequans’ advanced receiver technology for improved performance.
