Disruptive new market entrants like Opencell are proving the market for multi-operator indoor cellular

Every time a new building goes up, or an old building is refurbished, it’s an opportunity to enhance mobile signals indoors. It’s becoming more and more difficult to provide coverage into energy efficient, modern buildings from outdoor cell sites, yet the huge and growing market for in building solutions (IBS) remains under-served by MNOs and towercos alike. A new breed of disruptive new market entrants are leveraging small cell technology to enable multi-operator indoor coverage to enterprises and private home-owners. Opencell is one such pioneer – in two years they have deployed over 1,400 small cells into 70 sites in the UK.

The Future Network: Please introduce Opencell and describe where you fit in the heterogenous network ecosystem.

Opencell is the first legal, and truly multi-operator indoor mobile signal solution provider in the UK. As a business we influence international groups investing in the future of infrastructure connectivity and mobile networks because of our unique ability to deliver all four UK networks via small cells, ensuring everyone indoors has network.

The Future Network: Forgive the question, but why is there a need for Opencell – what can you do that MNOs, towercos and joint ventures like MBNL and CTIL cannot do?

Unlike MBNL and CTIL who support two, we support all four UK operators, enabling the significant and growing numbers of businesses who now recognise the clear benefit of having full multi-operator mobile phone signal.

MBNL and CTIL were set up to consolidate and share the macro network and tower sites. On in-building CTIL is a little involved with Vodafone and Telefonica, delivering the sites on a reciprocal basis, but this is not a major focus. And MBNL do not get involved in in-building.

Getting the MNOs to collaborate in pairs via MBNL and CTIL is difficult enough, getting all four to collaborate in a business set up to provision multi-operator indoor coverage would be even more challenging.

Hence, I see a growing need for companies that are set up to live or die by having good relationships with the operators, and that are dedicated to make a success of providing multi-operator in-building mobile coverage as a service (now being referred to regularly as the Neutral Host model or Neutral Host suppliers).

Meanwhile insofar as the towercos are concerned with in-building, they remain preoccupied with selling operators shared DAS. Compared with small cells, DAS are capitally intensive, can take 9-18 months to deploy, and the building owner often has to face uncertainty. Typically, there’s no guarantee they’ll have signal from two operators, let alone all four.

Finally, the mobile network operators’ focus is on retaining their high value enterprise customers. This makes them reluctant to push a multi-operator-solution, despite UK businesses increasing need to support the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) culture.

The Future Network: What is the addressable market for Opencell?

Our addressable market is growing by the day as new buildings go up and as old buildings are refurbished.

There have been big changes in building construction techniques, particularly concerning environmental friendliness and heating efficiency. This means that when a new building goes up, or an old building is refurbished to modern standards, the glass on the windows is now is very thick, with metallic coating, and is filled with argon gas. As intended, heat doesn’t penetrate very well, but neither do mobile phone signals!

This also means that the higher frequency bands that will be used for 5G won’t penetrate buildings, meaning that Wi-Fi networks will need supplementing to enable, maintain and promote the growing ‘smart building’ culture in the UK.

Our view is that every large urban building will need in building cellular solutions installed – with up to 17,000 sites across the United Kingdom today.

The Future Network: What is Opencell’s proposition for building owners and developers, and can you share some examples that illustrate your success in forming such partnerships?

Opencell have brought to market the first really successful neutral host model in the world.

Our solution is based on small cells and solves the coverage dilemma that results from the dreadful service provided by DAS (which is typically not just in the UK but internationally).

Opencell not only provides a legal, multi-operator small cell-based service – it is both bespoke and almost always deliverable at a significantly lower cost than DAS solutions.

The potential cost savings are massive in the middle market: hotels, large office and apartment blocks, and we have dozens of success stories to share. Serviced offices, where customers demand multi-operator mobile connectivity, are a big customer of ours. We now work with Workspace, Regus, The Office Group, Fora, WeWork, Ocubis and The Out Of Town Group.

Any office hosting 50-5,000 people could benefit, particularly enterprises that have bring your own device schemes, or have customers or flexible staff on different networks to other employees. We’ve connected the headquarters of the Co-op, Northamptonshire County Council, Gorkana, and the John Henry Group, and we’ve installed the world’s first centralised 4G indoor mobile signal solution on the AECOM floors of the Aldgate Tower, London.

Four or five-star hotels can suffer from poor ratings when there isn’t a mobile signal indoors. We’ve had great success enhancing coverage at landmark hotels like Claridge’s, the Sheraton Grand, the Mandarin Oriental, Hilton London Bankside, The Connaught Hotel and The Village Hotel in Portsmouth. Similarly, lower ground floor business lounges or conference centres often need to enhance cellular coverage, for example we’ve helped The Derby Conference Centre in this regard.

Residential apartments that struggle to sell or have higher void rates are a good target, especially high end residences with large underground development spaces or with upper floors – often the high-end penthouses – that have poor signal (in part because of the energy efficient anodised glass increasingly used in new builds). We provided a multi-operator solution for the top five floors of Vauxhall Tower to overcome precisely these challenges. In March 2018 we completed our largest installation to date at Chiltern Place, which includes 152 small cells and includes 4G for Vodafone.

We also enabled a bespoke multi-operator mobile solution throughout Gordon House, which is home to luxury property developer Nick Candy, where we had to overcome the twin challenges of providing coverage underground, while working with the opulent marble finish of the property, all of which had created a signal dead zone. At the moment our solution probably makes economic sense for residential premises of 50,000 sqft and above.

Of course we’ve done shopping centres and sports venues such as Brighton and Hove Albion Football Club and Wimbledon, where we cover the sub-surface media centre and service routes that keep The Championships running. University and corporate campuses are another great target, for example we’ve helped to provide a first class working environment at Southampton Science Park. And healthcare venues that provide premium retirement living communities are another addressable market, for example we’ve installed our solutions at Extracare Longridge.

The Future Network: Are you deploying small cells for each operator, or are multi-operator small cells a viable solution for you?

The multi-operator small cells I’ve seen aren’t mature enough yet. The capability is not there to integrate with current UK mobile networks – the frequencies would be all over the place in a neutral host solution like ours. When a larger proportion of devices are LTE capable they may become an option, but we’re simply not there in the UK yet.

The Future Network: What are the technologies that enable Opencell to provide this service?

Opencell are technology agnostic, and we’ll support the operators in bringing new products on board.

Too many small cell developers are focusing product development on the MNO not on the end user, as well as focusing on 5G, which leaves a gap in the market to support today’s 3G / 4G use cases. Spidercloud provides a working 3G and 4G service, of which NEC is a provider, and we also use Nokia and Cisco small cells, but even these are approaching end of life. Many of the newer solutions support only 4G and 5G and need a 3G base station feed which can escalate the cost to something similar to DAS.

The Future Network: What are the problems with the DAS and booster system deployment?

Boosters cause significant interference in built up areas where the bulk of the demand for service is, as such they are illegal unless licenced^[1] and rightly the operators won’t licence a system in urban areas. However, we have heard about this changing in the very near future. [1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/consultations-and-statements/category-3/regulations-short-range-devices-mobile-repeaters?utm_source=updates&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mobile-repeaters

DAS systems have been a nightmare over the years with a huge expense, horrendous cabling issues and enormous space requirements. Then even after having such a system installed, getting multiple operators to connect has been at best, incredibly difficult and at worst, impossible. Each operator also needs a separate fibre connection, resulting in even more cost. There are now neater digital solutions which reduce some of the cabling issues, the need for a base station and its cost. However, lengthy approval processes and the separate dedicated fibre backhaul still make DAS a major problem if you want a truly multi-operator service at low cost.

The Future Network: Tell us about the operational processes that underpin your indoor mobile signal service.

Opencell provide a full managed, worry-free, service. We have invested in radio engineering tools and an innovative network monitoring and management system that enables us to manage the network to over 99.5% network availability levels.

Our services include survey, design, MNO processes, installation, commissioning, acceptance testing, then 24*7 monitoring and business day fault repair of all equipment.

The Future Network: How is Opencell financed, what is your proposition to investors, and how does your business model compare to, for example, the recognised macro tower company business model?

We are self-financed and are not actively looking for investors.

Our model is different from towercos in that our revenue comes from the enterprise market and not from the MNOs. Whereas towercos would pay for the system up front, offer it free to the enterprise, and generate their revenue from the MNOs.

The changing need in the market is caused by new building materials blocking mobile phone signal. Asking the mobile operators to solve this problem (which is not of their making) is very difficult with budgets getting tighter and tighter.

Now that enterprise businesses see a clear benefit to ensuring that they have mobile phone signal indoors, we have been able to establish a very different business model to the towercos. And we’re extremely proud of that.

 The Future Network: Congratulations on the milestones you achieved in your first year of trading – passing the 1,000-deployed small cell mark, facilitating signal at Wimbledon 2017, and achieving G-cloud status as a government supplier – what have been some of the highlights in your second year of trading?

I am most proud of the team we have, for a small business I think we punch significantly above our weight. Our engineering team are flexible and can-do, our sales and marketing team are getting the message out there, and technology wise we are pioneering and piloting new products for the operators.

For example, we have recently piloted the new Spidercloud centralised service node for one operator in the UK, which enables indoor coverage to leapfrog from no access to mobile signal, straight to the best voice and data experience available, prompting Kye Prigg, head of networks, Vodafone UK, to say: “We are proud that through our partnership with Opencell we are able to provide the UK’s first 4G indoor coverage to residents and visitors of AECOM at Aldgate Tower.”

This is borne by the data centre we have invested in, our can-do attitude and, because we are small, we can be incredibly flexible in order to get things done quickly. This combined with our experience in the market means we won’t compromise on signal and service quality too, which is of course why the MNOs all like to work with us.

Opencell now has over 70 customer sites, with 1,400 femto cells live and a total of 2,233 femto cells ordered.

The Future Network: Are you looking to set up service in other countries?

Yes we are, and we are actively looking for partners so that we can share our know-how, the management platforms and technology we have developed to enable service in other countries. Many of our customers are desperate for solutions in other countries, as they have similar problems to the UK market in terms of how DAS and booster systems have been deployed.

---

Graham Payne is uniquely qualified to comment on the evolution of network rollout and network sharing in the UK and beyond. Current advisor to global mobile connectivity groups, having previously provided executive level support to Vodafone on the Beacon project with Telefonica and CTIL, Graham is the former Managing Director of MBNL, and planning and deployment director of T-Mobile. Graham most recently co-founded Opencell, the first legal, indoor mobile signal solution provider in the UK. Opencell is unique is being able to deliver all four operator networks using small cells.

---

Graham Payne will be speaking at the 3rd Annual TowerXchange Meetup Europe, taking place on April 17-18 at the Business Design Centre, London. Click here for more information.