Nokia teams up with Telefónica Chile to provide better service to shoppers in Santiago shopping center (that has approximately 110,000 visitors a day) giving them all 3G or 4G service.
There’s very little these days as annoying as not having cell phone service when you go places. In Santiago, Chile, Nokia extended Small Cell Technology over a shopping center to meet specific needs of over 110,000 people to guarantee that they all have access to high-speed 3G or 4G data connections to make calls, use Facebook, send images, or surf the internet to look for cheaper prices online.
Complete Coverage of Over 1.68 Km of Floor Space and Basements
Nokia expects to cover the 168,000 square meter retail area floor space and parking areas with the most high-capacity, high-coverage networks possible. More people will be able to be online at once, giving Telefónica Chile more technology to expand outwards with the help of Nokia as customer needs continue to grow and expand.
Nokia’s Goal: Providing Small Cells (Called HetNets) to Provide Small Cells in Isolated Areas
While the software has limitations (each floor can only provide service for 4,400 devices), it’s a move in the right direction to provide service in isolated locations, with the best deployment possible to reduce costs. In fact, the head of Marketing at Nokia said that they hope to better meet the “demands of [areas where] they can handle interference from outdoor networks, to ensure that everyone inside an area stays on the same network.”
This technology is expected to drastically improve the capacity of the speeds in Chile drastically. The change is estimated around 63 times faster (including 4G LTE upload speeds around 70 times faster). These changes have already led to a 100 percent increase in traffic in the area, as well as a 70 percent increase in upload traffic.