RCR Mobile Minute
Small Cells Americas is underway in Dallas, and Wi-Fi is a major theme at this year’s event. The show kicked off yesterday with a Wi-Fi monetization workshop, and today ABI Research is moderating a panel entitled “Carrier Wi-Fi and Small Cells” with panelists from Cisco, Iusacell and Time Warner Cable.
Some of the most significant large-scale deployments of Wi-Fi hot spots in the U.S. have been undertaken by cable operators, and that industry is well represented at Small Cells Americas this year. One of the biggest questions for carriers is whether the cable operators have beaten them to the punch when it comes to Wi-Fi deployments. Analyst Joe Madden of Mobile Experts thinks that’s a question that has already been answered.
“Several large mobile operators have made a gigantic blunder by ignoring the opportunity to deploy Wi-Fi or utilize Hotspot 2.0 – so cable operators and other service providers are jumping on the opportunity,” Madden wrote recently. “Even if we exclude homespot deployments, the number of Wi-Fi access points will reach the level of millions for cable operators and public venues during 2015, outstripping the capacity of new LTE base stations.”
But future LTE small cells will integrate Wi-Fi connectivity. Ericsson, Nokia Networks and Alcatel-Lucent have all announced new small cells that integrate Wi-Fi, and AT&T said publicly months ago that it wanted all small cells it deploys to include Wi-Fi.
From an enterprise perspective, small cells can be hard to understand because they are not as universally accessible as Wi-Fi access points or neutral host DAS. But small cells can offer enterprises a way to add capacity efficiently and to work with mobile operators to create targeted apps and offers.