Pushing the LTE Capability Towards 5G: The Analysis of Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) Implementation for High-Density Area in Indonesia

The number of mobile network subscribers has increased over the past few years rapidly. 4G LTE, as a part of wireless technology, made a significant contribution through the coverage expansion around countries but still faces critical issues, namely spectrum scarcity. However, the growth of data users and data consumption seems to be increased. The Mobile Network Operator (MNO) tried to provide the infrastructures and services that capable of responding to the necessity of capacity, reliability, and availability. 3GPP answered the opportunity by introducing the LTE-Advanced Pro (4.9 G) technology with 3GPP Rel-13 that called Licensed Assisted Access (LAA). LAA uses carrier aggregation technology, both licensed and 5 GHz unlicensed band. Through utilizing the unlicensed band, MNO tried to face the necessity of improvement with the cost-efficiency. This paper tries to introduce the LAA implementation in a dense urban area of Indonesia. Based on the calculation result of capacity and coverage planning in Jakarta, LAA will increase the capacity from 41.95% to 61.67% in the time period 2020 - 2030 based on existing LTE capacity. Besides capacity planning, the coverage planning resulted in the amount of required LAA site to covered 40 Points of Interest (POI) area by 72 outdoor LAA and 119 indoor LAA. According to business feasibility analysis for economic aspects, LAA business implementation in the dense urban area is categorized as feasible with positive NPV value at IDR 390,653,517,937; IRR > rate at 40.61%, and three years and three months payback period (PP) on the baseline scenario.