Small cell deployments and Wi-Fi offload are two of the most important ways that mobile operators increase network capacity and coverage, but until recently they have been seen as separate solutions. Now carriers are looking for small cells that integrate Wi-Fi connectivity. These so-called “multi-standard” cells are not expected to hit the market until next year at the earliest, but operators are not waiting to integrate Wi-Fi into their small cell solutions. AT&T, which is in the process of deploying 40,000 small cells as part of its Project Velocity IP initiative, has said that it does not want to roll out any small cell deployments in 2014 that do not include Wi-Fi.
Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) is at the forefront of small cell/Wi-Fi integration with its lightRadio software. The company has said it will integrate Wi-Fi solutions from Qualcomm and Motorola into its multi-standard metrocells.
“There’s a lot of interest in Wi-Fi being added into these cells,” said Greg Fischer, vice president for carrier access at Broadcom (BRCM). “Our particular devices don’t have Wi-Fi integrated into them, but the Broadcom Wi-Fi is integrated onto the platform and into the software.”
Qualcomm (QCOM) recently launched its FSM99xx small cell chipset, which can host Wi-Fi at Layer 3. “We have two PCIE ports which can support Wi-Fi radios, and then we can aggregate and integrate the traffic at Layer 3,” said Nick Karter, vice president of business development and product management at Qualcomm Atheros. “We can host the Wi-Fi off this chipset … but the actual Wi-Fi radios are separate. The important thing about the fact that we are hosting at Layer 3 is that you can integrate the traffic and do connection management.”
“Qualcomm has a vested interest in making Wi-Fi handoff work properly, because it has the leading position in smartphone processors,” said analyst J. Scott Gardner of The Linley Group. “Its 2011 acquisition of Atheros challenges Broadcom for leadership in Wi-Fi access points. Add the 2012 acquisition of DesignArt to include 4G cellular infrastructure technology, and Qualcomm has all the hardware elements required to make Wi-Fi a major feature of small cells.”
Qualcomm and Broadcom know that their small cell customers can choose to integrate a third party Wi-Fi solution, but they are likely to save time if they work with just one chip vendor. “Certainly customers always have the option of integrating themselves, and bringing other Wi-Fi to the solution,” said Broadcom’s Greg Fischer. “But I think what we’ve seen in other markets that we participate in where we use Wi-Fi with Broadcom chipsets is that customers see the time-to-market benefit of working with one supplier to integrate both the software and the RF. … I would say 80% of the time customers will go with silicon from one supplier.”
But the small cell market may prove to be different, because several competitors come from the macrocell market, and are not major suppliers of Wi-Fi chipsets. “There are a handful of [Wi-Fi] vendors that a carrier would want to use,” said Tom Flanagan, director of technical strategy for digital signal processing systems at Texas Instruments (TXN). “We did not want to integrate and lose a design based on Wi-Fi.” This summer the company unveiled its new TCI6630K2L system-on-chip. Like Qualcomm’s FSM99x, the TCI6630K2L is a 28 nanometer chip that can support dozens of 3G and/or 4G connections.
Freescale (FSL) says its customers routinely integrate Wi-Fi with its small cell solution, QorIQ Qonverge, but the company chose not integrate a radio in order to give OEMs more flexibility. “Customers deploy Wi-Fi in implementations based on Qonverge all the time,” said Stephen Turnbull, director of marketing at Freescale’s digital networking division. “The reason we don’t integrate the RFIC (radio frequency integrated circuit) is because, based on the application, the radio’s (RFIC) capacity does not always match the baseband’s capacity (Qonverge)…so integrated RFICs are thereby somewhat inflexible. Our approach allows optimal flexibility. And in fact our approach is exactly the same on the enterprise WLAN space, where QorIQ and Freescale lead the market. So we’ve been very successful with our approach and our customers have appreciated the flexibility provided.” Chip designers will need to strike a balance between flexibility and time-to-market as mobile operators look for more integration of small cells and Wi-Fi.
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