The jump to 4G has made a significant impact on technologies in place at cellular sites, both macro and small cell, according to Steve King, applications engineer with 3M.
“If I had to summarize what I see happening right now particularly in North America, and the U.S. marketplace, it would be all about what we call densification. Network densification,” King said in a video interview with RCR’s Kelly Hill.
King talks about major macro site investment initiatives at the national carriers, and how site architectures are changing in order to support ever faster networks with ever more capacity, as well as the influence of newly emerging TDD-LTE networks with much more complicated antennas, and small cells.
“The point of all this is that what we see at the macro site is more and  more infrastructure trying to support the demands of the mobile workforce, the wireless data growth that we’re seeing,” King said.
King addresses trends in installation best practices and his work with the IWPC; increases in energy efficiency vs. changing loads on the tower and tower mounts; and upcoming trends such as cloud RAN architectures, smart sites with increased M2M monitoring for macro sites, and edge data caching in order to speed up network content delivery.
Watch the in-depth video interview:
Want more insight on tower technology trends? Download RCR’s recent special report on the topic. You can also check out another feature on network decommissioning.Â
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