Providing ubiquitous cellular coverage for a dense urban environment

The provision of ubiquitous cellular coverage to a dense urban area is difficult to achieve. This is due to the hostile radiowave propagation environments coupled with high building penetration loss. Yet it is becoming a pre-requisite for good service quality for all personal communications networks. Good radio coverage, especially for in-building locations, can only be secured by careful base site antenna positioning and flexible utilisation of coverage strategies in accordance to the environment. The author highlights some of the key problems which an operator may encounter and proposes solutions based on practical experience in deploying a real-life network