Sprint said this week that it plans to deploy tens of thousands of small cells as part of its network upgrade. The carrier said it will use network diagnostics to pinpoint the perfect spot for each small cell “down to the street corner level.” But once Sprint finds the perfect spot, it may not always be able to place a small cell there.
“A lot of it is going to hinge on whether there is actual real estate there to put something,” said Steve Kemp, manager of small cell site solutions at CommScope, speaking about small cell deployments in general and not about Sprint in particular. “It’s going to have to fit in with the environment. There is going to be a permitting process,” he said. “It’s probably going to go through several iterations of trial and error vis-a-vis the photo simulations that have to be done to see if everybody’s going to be happy with the look and feel.”
In San Francisco, citizens have had the opportunity to share their feedback on images of the Verizon Wireless small cells deployment that is currently underway. The carrier and its partner ExteNet Systems are deploying small cells on utility poles and city-owned light poles. The utility poles are less expensive, but they raise more concerns from the community because the small cells seem more obtrusive on the wooden poles than they do on the steel.
“We all thought it was going to be easy, like 5 or 6 years ago,” said Kemp. “Quite the contrary.” The site acquisition process can be at least as complex for small cells as it is for macro sites, and this complexity is multiplied over a much larger number of sites.
Jason Campbell, VP of services at Smartlink, oversees carrier site acquisitions for both macro sites and small cells. He said that as the sites become smaller, the challenges can become bigger.
“Building networks in areas of higher population density challenges the age-old site acquisition questions of leasability (where can you locate at a reasonable recurring cost? – very important in this whole discussion), zonability (can you prove the need for it?) and constructability (what are your backhaul considerations?),” said Campbell during a recent RCR Wireless webinar.
Site acquisition also figures prominently into the cost of small cell deployments. Kemp’s back-of-the-envelope calculations put site acquisition costs on par with the equipment itself.
“Proportionately it’s probably a third equipment, a third installation and then probably a third everything else, like three times through the permitting cycle at $3,000 a throw or something,” he said. “So there’s quite a bit of money that is everything else.”
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