Japanese operator NTT DoCoMO partnered with Mitsubishi Estate to develop 5G-driven smart districts in Tokyo.
DoCoMo will develop an infrastructure base or "cluster" that considers the urban landscape and leverages antenna placement suitable for millimeter-wave (mmWave) radio wave coverage.
The Otemachi, Marunouchi, and Yurakucho districts of Tokyo's densely urban Chiyoda ward, which fall under the collective name of Marunouchi, will be home to the clusters. DoCoMo installed base stations in June within the area that incorporated tri-band multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) radios supporting 280 total megahertz spread across the 3.5 GHz, 3.7 GHz, and 4.5 GHz spectrum bands. The carrier also installed glass antennas supporting 800-megahertz of mmWave spectrum.
DoCoMo explained that the installation was part of a project to install numerous antennas without disrupting what was described as the “beautiful urban landscape” of Marunouchi’s more historical corners, which includes the Imperial Palace.
While the commercial district has a tiny residential population, it does play host to around 350,000 workers across less than half-a-square mile.
The partnership expands on nationwide base station deployments utilizing Mitsubishi Estate's 5G infrastructure sharing business, with future work to entail use of the NTT parent group’s all-photonics network (APN) technology, which leverages optics over electricity for data transmission across the network.
As an NTT subsidiary, DoCoMo has been at the forefront of the APN push, having recently unveiled a distributed, network-centric AI cluster across Japan powered by the tech.
This year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) event also saw DoCoMo reveal an in-network computing capability within its mainline 5G core that connects the mobile network to the APN service, helping to coordinate AI inference processing in tandem with traffic control. This deployment followed an all-photonics service in Hong Kong from DoCoMo targeting low-latency needs for financial institutions in the region.
Source: https://www.sdxcentral.com/news/tokyo-wards-tap-ntt-5g-to-become-smart-city-hubs/
