5g New Radio For Rural Broadband: How To Achieve Long-Range Coverage On The 3.5 Ghz Band

The new 3GPP New Radio standard (NR) has the potential of providing high rate mobile broadband services for very long range (resulting in very low cost per subscriber) utilizing the 3.5 GHz band. In this paper, we discuss the technoeconomic problems associated with providing high quality mobile broadband services to under-served areas and propose best practice enhancements for the network as well as for the terminals. On the terminal side, a solution based on low-cost user deployed booster equipment combined with access to local spectrum for rural hot-spots is proposed. On the network side we utilize high gain massive MIMO antennas. To reach the large fraction of the world's population that are under GSM coverage, these are deployed on existing GSM sites. As a complement, they can also be deployed on high TV-towers. We also briefly discuss spectrum and policy aspects, which have a very large impact on the rural cellular market. We show that on an existing GSM-grid planned for voice coverage, it is possible to reach downlink data rates exceeding 100 Mbps at cell edge with 5G NR using conventional terminals and normal base station equipment, however the uplink performance is not adequate in this scenario. By enhancing the network and terminal hardware we can reach more than 350 Mbps in the DL and more than 30 Mbps in the UL. Additionally, using taller base station towers we can extend the coverage far beyond that enabled by typical GSM sites.