The urban RF environment is very demanding – densely packed with a myriad of cellular and non-cellular transmitters, full of interfering emitters and populated with buildings inconveniently located between you and the signal you are trying to find. In this situation, it pays to know the merits of different interference hunting techniques and the advantages of using expert equipment. Anyone…

3GPP Release 15 specifies the initial 5G standardization framework of the radio access network called 5G New Radio (5G NR). The standard contains a high degree of flexibility in radio parameters, which complicates network measurements. However, Rohde & Schwarz has already conducted measurements in pre-commercial 5G NR trial networks with our commercially available 5G NR network measurement solution. We gained…

Signals Research Group trusts the prototype measurement system designed by Rohde & Schwarz to meet the aggressive timeline of early 5G adopters. The US-based research consultancy used the R&S®TSMA autonomous drive test scanner for their independent 5G test network benchmark study to collect downlink performance metrics for the Beam Reference Signals (BRS), including RSRP, CINR, RSRQ, PCI, etc., of 28 GHz…

Our scanner-based solution to measure coverage in NB-IoT networks pioneered NB-IoT field measurements in 2017. Since then, thousands of kilometers have been driven and walked in order to collect and analyze data from all available operators and cells in an NB-IoT network. Numerous NB-IoT field engineers shared their experiences, providing us with valuable feedback. This post summarizes our customers’ latest…

The inexorable demand for more mobile data volume requires ever-higher capacities in radio mobile networks. Network densification and the introduction of new frequencies could be solutions, but both are time-consuming and cost intensive. The implementation of higher-order MIMO features into existing radio networks, however, will boost peak data rates throughout the network and deliver an additional capacity gain. 4×4 MIMO…

The US operator Verizon Wireless targets fixed wireless access (FWA) in the 28 GHz frequency band. With partners, they created a pre-5G specification called 5G Technical Forum (5GTF). The business case depends on the number of households that can be connected to a certain number of base stations and still provide a suitably high data throughput. For the required signal…

Everyone is talking about 5G. Long before commercial 5G services are even available, a myriad of articles, reports, presentations and speeches have been made public – creating a big buzz and high expectations in the new standard. What’s the role of mobile network testing on the path to 5G? How can scanner measurements help operators pave the way to the…

Different mobile network measurement tools target different measurement scenarios. One might be the preferred choice for collecting mass data for benchmarking; another might offer extensive possibilities for engineering and troubleshooting. Do we always know how the collected measurement data is being evaluated when we are performing the actual measurement? Most probably not. But wouldn’t it be great if we could…

How can mobile app testing support network optimization? In previous posts, we explained how you could assess the QoE of data applications on smartphones by measuring the success rate and duration of a series of actions. Based on large-scale real field measurement data, we showed how the duration saturates at higher available network speeds and examined the causes of this…