Alcatel-Lucent has announced lightRadio, a new system to end the mobile industry’s reliance on masts and base stations. According to company statement new lightRadio system will dramatically reduce technical complexity and contain power consumption and other operating costs in the face of sharp traffic growth.

With lightRadio the base station, typically located at the base of each cell site tower, is broken into its components elements and then distributed into both the antenna and throughout a cloud-like network. Using this solution, clutter of antennas serving 2G, 3G, and LTE systems are combined and shrunk into a single powerful multi frequency, multi standard Wideband Active Array Antenna that can be mounted on poles, sides of buildings or anywhere else there is power and a broadband connection.

The new generation of active antennas allows vertical beam-forming that improves capacity in urban and suburban sites by about 30%,  supports all technologies (2G, 3G, and LTE) and covers multiple frequency bands with a single unit.

Other major benefits from lightRadio include shrinking the carbon footprint of mobile networks by over 50%, reducing the Total-Cost-of-Ownership of mobile operators by up to 50% and improving end user services by significantly increasing bandwidth per user thanks to the deployment of small antennas everywhere.