Small cells, software-defined networking, cloud networking and the move toward 100G networks are among the major trends in telecom right now, and RCR Wireless News spoke with a series of companies recently on the impact of those technologies.
At last week’s Telecom Exchange event in Denver, Rich Ruben, CEO of rural fiber-based wireless backhaul provider PEG Bandwidth, said that his company is seeing RFPs for small cells in rural markets, despite the stereotypical vision of a small cell deployment being in a dense, urban area.
“Small cell’s going to be a great market. The carriers are all still learning about it, as are the service providers,” Ruben said. “We’re seeing a lot of RPFs, everyone trying to learn and understand, and we think it’s going to be a tremendous opportunity.”
Watch the video interview:
Dave Jones, who is SVP of mobile infrastructure implementation and heads the fiber-to-the-tower product group at bandwidth infrastructure provider Zayo Group, told RCR Wireless News that the wireless carriers are in advanced stages of deploying LTE and estimates that perhaps 70% of sites have fiber backhaul. Carriers are upgrading their initial bandwidth now that LTE is in place, he added.
Jones said that for small cells to be successful they need to be approached as a partnership among carriers, equipment providers and backhaul infrastructure providers like Zayo to figure out a business model that works.
More details in the interview:
Pat Gault, VP of Americas sales, services and marketing network company Ekinops, noted that standardization is still a huge challenge for software-defined networks, despite the potential value. He also said that the company has seen good momentum in the move from 10G networks toward 100G and that “2014 and 2015 are going to be very exciting years in 100G.”
Paul Savill, SVP of product management for Level 3, told RCR Wireless News about both providing infrastructure and connectivity to enable cloud services as well as selling cloud services itself; momentum in 100G adoption; and early use cases for SDN that the company is seeing.
Both SDN and NFV “hold great promise for the industry,” Savill said. “SDN is very important from the perspective of its promise of being able to manipulate the network on a real-time basis as events unfold or as new inputs come into us, to tell us that we need to change something around.”
Hear more from Savill:
