Has anyone seen value in activating multi use MIMO? In general, is this feature active for most of the operators? Does Nokia support it at all?
It certainly is paid feature from vendors. If you deploy MaMIMO but do not buy the MU-MIMO feature then you have cheaped out on the most important feature. MU-MIMO with Ma-MIMO antenna can multiply your cells capacity by the number of layers. Easily 5-8x on a paper, 2-3x in real terms (of course depending on a clutter, UE distribution, average SNR, etc.)
Thanks for the answer. In theory it looks great but I’m looking for real numbers and experience from a live network. I heard some people saying they didn’t see value as expected. Just for example: MCS can be degraded so UEs will get lower modulation while using MU-MIMO.
in real terms 2-3x cell capacity improvement is expected. But it has many conditions to be met, and so it is site to site and sector to sector dependent.
You need good SNR and many users who are spread around so they can be paired. Also if the traffic load is low, often the MU-MIMO feature won’t kick in, scheduler has thresholds. You can check DL layers counters to see.
You should specify what numbers, KPIs you are looking for