The saying “don’t reinvent the wheel” implies not repeating what has already been done. In the early days of 5G, operators seem to heed that advice. During the 4G era, operators relied on cell splitting via small cells in dense urban areas to increase network capacity. Back then, operators had limited spectrum. After the 4×4 MIMO upgrade on LTE macro sites, the small cell network densification was the next logical step to increase network capacity and offload traffic from the macro network in the face of a data tsunami. In the first phase of the 5G network rollout, operators have mainly applied the wide channel bandwidth of mid-band spectrum with massive MIMO radios to increase network capacity.
