Suppliers of small cells and the components that differentiate them are heading into Mobile World Congress with confidence, as their solutions finally start to gain traction in the market. AT&T says it has now added small cells to its network in 18 states, and that a number of its large enterprise customers around the country are enjoying better coverage thanks to small cells. Verizon Wireless has tapped Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent for small cell deployments, with Alcatel-Lucent’s solutions already being deployed in the network. Alcatel-Lucent supplies AT&T as well, and is joining AT&T and SpiderCloud Wireless in Barcelona this week on a panel entitled “The year of Small Cells (Finally)?”
Component orders suggest an affirmative answer to that question. Freescale, which has extended its macrocell chip business to small cells in recent years, says momentum is building. “We’ve shipped very significant volumes on small cells this year as well as macro, so we really do see genuine volume growth in the small cell market coming now, driven by LTE,” said Freescale’s Stephen Turnbull, director of marketing.
Moving outdoors
Turnbull says most of Freescale’s small cell chip shipments to date have been for indoor solutions, but he sees the mix shifting to include more outdoor cells. As large operators complete their macrocell deployments, they are looking to metrocells to fill in coverage gaps. He attributes the increased interest in metrocells to LTE, which has boosted the demand for data and driven a need for greater coverage and capacity.
“I think what we’re seeing now specifically with the deployment of LTE is a more rapid adoption of small cells across different form factors, true HetNet deployments,” Turnbull said. Ahead of Mobile World Congress, Freescale is launching a new SoC targeting the metrocell space, called the B3421. Turnbull says many operators are looking at wireless backhaul for metrocells, so Freescale designed its solution with sufficient bandwidth to support both fronthaul and backhaul.
Beyond coverage and capacity
Increased coverage and capacity are currently the main objectives for metrocells, but indoor small cells are already poised to do even more by facilitating new revenue streams for carriers. “Whether it’s device management as a service from the cloud, guest Wi-Fi as a managed service by a mobile operator into the enterprise, PBX integration … when it comes to large scale deployments, you can’t go provision each AP or each radio node out there,” said Ronny Haraldsvik of SpiderCloud Wireless. “We have a services node platform where we have a controller or gateway that sits behind all of these radio nodes, and you can provision that point. … Since it’s deployed inside of the enterprise it ends up being a point of entry into the enterprise for cloud and applications services.” Haraldsvik says SpiderCloud’s SON-enabled small cell solution can scale up to 100 radio nodes and can serve up to 10,000 devices in a building. So far, many of SpiderCloud’s customers are government entities and financial institutions.
Ericsson is also promoting small cells as a way for operators to enhance the value of their networks with new services. The telecom equipment giant recently launched its “small cells as a service” initiative. Ericsson says that in addition to increased coverage, small cells can offer operators a way to facilitate delivery of advertising and OTT services, and a means of monetizing carrier-grade Wi-Fi. Carriers are increasingly interested in integrated Wi-Fi as part of their small cell solutions. AT&T has said that it does not want to deploy any small cell solutions that do not include Wi-Fi.
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Watch the RCR Wireless interviews: SpiderCloud Wireless and Freescale.
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Small cells in focus: Wi-Fi integration
