Cisco today announced that Proximus (formerly Belgacom), Belgium’s leading telecommunications and IT services provider, has selected Cisco® small cell technology to deliver high-quality “five bar” indoor coverage to its business and residential customers.

With modern building techniques and insulation standards causing greater cellular signal losses indoors, mobile carriers are challenged to deliver high quality indoor mobile service. Small cell technology helps mobile carriers significantly improve voice and data coverage and capacity indoors at much lower cost than traditional macro cellular investments.

Launched earlier this month, Proximus’s new “Mobile Coverage Extender” service creates a cellular service within the small business or home to significantly improve the quality of indoor 3G coverage. Cisco’s small cell base stations can be installed very easily by customers themselves by simply plugging the device directly into their Proximus broadband connection.

Alex Lorette, Director Enterprise Telco Solutions at Proximus comments, “Delivering the best in class mobile customer experience is our number 1 priority, and Cisco’s small cell technology is a critical component of this strategy. We have worked with Cisco for a number of years and its technology has proven to deliver the customer experiences that we strive for.”

“Businesses and consumers are demanding greater cellular coverage indoors because this is where they use their mobile phones most often. However, both interference and signal losses caused by modern urban buildings makes this very difficult to achieve with traditional macro-cellular technology,” comments Scott Morrison, Vice President and General Manager, Radio Access Networks and Optimisation at Cisco. “Addressing indoor coverage for its customers has been a key objective for Proximus, and we are pleased that Cisco’s small cell technology came out on top as the most technically advanced solution to meet their needs.”

Proximus will initially offer two different models of Cisco’s small cell base stations in order to cater for different levels of indoor capacity requirements; the Cisco Universal Small Cell (USC) 3000 Series (a dedicated small-cell base station for homes and small offices) and the USC 7000 Series (Cisco’s small cell solution for high-density business environments).

The network core of the Proximus small cell solution is built on the Cisco ASR 5000 Series mobile gateway with management provided by the Cisco Universal Small Cell RAN Management System.

This deployment of Cisco small cell technology builds on the announcement earlier this year of the renewed Strategic Partnership between Cisco and Proximus to co-develop business models around three growth areas: next-generation video delivery, smart and connected cities, and service orchestration and SDN.

               

ENDS

 

RSS Feed for Cisco: http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/rss.html

 

About Cisco

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide leader in IT that helps companies seize the opportunities of tomorrow by proving that amazing things can happen when you connect the previously unconnected. For ongoing news, please go to http://thenetwork.cisco.com.

#  #  #

Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. A listing of Cisco's trademarks can be found at www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company.