Small cells serve as complement to DAS, not replacement
LONDON, England – Nokia’s head of small cells, in an exclusive interview with RCR Wireless News, said that small cells shipments are picking up and the technology is poised to finally take off in 2015.
Stephane Daeuble, head of small cells/hetnet product marketing, was on hand for the Small Cells World Summit this week in East London.
He said small cells use cases for both indoor and outdoor deployments show the promise of the technology, which has not kept pace with perhaps ambitious projection of carrier adoption.
Daeuble said in the case of a special event network set up, small cell “fits like a glove. They are able to be deployed very rapidly, able to handle a lot of capacity and really do help bring extremely good user experience for people in special events.”
That holds true for deployments both outdoors and indoors, he said.
“Bringing this LTE performance indoors is one of the key benefits of the small cells. So far, [distributed antenna systems] has been the key deployment solution for those indoor locations. People are used to LTE performance in outdoor. They want the same performance in indoor locations.”
He said small cells can work in tandem with older DAS to add LTE.
“We think DAS systems have got some very strong value in terms of capability of supporting multitechnology, multifrequency and really being a neutral host. Where small cell comes into play is in capability of being a lot faster and a lot more cost effective to deploy. It really opens a new market in terms of indoor location. In quite a few cases, operators had used DAS systems because they had no other alternatives. Small cell will probably also have a key role in complementing older DAS systems and bringing LTE to older DAS solutions.”
Looking ahead, Daeuble said, “We’ve started to see some very significant volumes with our small cell solutions. We believe that 2015 will really be the year that we start to see some really large deployments of small cells.”
Visit rcrwireless.com for more coverage of Small Cells World Summit.
