China currently represents one-third of Huawei’s small cell business
SHANGHAI – Telecom equipment manufacturer Huawei expects to ship approximately 400,000 small cells this year, the company’s president of small cell product line Yuefeng Zhou said during this week’s Mobile World Congress Shanghai 2015.
Zhou said that small cells will be key in future “4.5G” and “5G” network deployments, adding that with the development of these advanced, though still undefined networks, smaller base station will become more popular.
“Small cells is a key business for Huawei. I can say that it is the fastest-growing segment for the company,” Zhou said on the sidelines of the industry trade show held at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre and the Kerry Hotel Pudong.
According to Zhou, the increasing demand for small cells will make the small cell business grow by 18 times in terms of revenue by 2020.
Zhou also said that China is currently the most important market for Huawei in the small cell business, both in terms of revenue and units shipped. He said that the Chinese market currently accounts for nearly one-third of the company’s overall small cell business.
“The Asian market is our largest market globally,” Zhou said. “Our key markets in the region are, Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea and Indonesia.”
The executive added that the rapid deployment of “4G” networks in China and other Asian countries contributed to the development of the small cell business. The Middle East, South Africa and Latin America are also key for the Chinese firm, Zhou said.
“Following the rapid deployment of 4G networks in China, we believe that demand for small cells in the country will stabilize in the coming years,” Zhou said. “However, this does not mean that we will stop growing in the small cell business. We will compensate this with the expected growth in other regions such as Europe, the Middle East and Latin America.”
Network densification – think small cells – are considered by many telecom industry watchers to be an integral part of eventual 5G mobile network standards.
To that end, Huawei is a board member of the European Union-based 5G Infrastructure Association, contributing its resources to some of the more forward-thinking projects under the Horizon 2020 Framework Program.
“Building fruitful alliances will be key to bringing us closer to transforming our vision of 5G into a global standard,” explained Wen Ton, CTI at Huawei Wireless. “Europe has huge potential for boosting 5G development by federating efforts, and the 5G-PPP is a good illustration of this approach.”
Huawei said it will be a leading contributor to four of the five key 5G areas, which include: mobile and wireless communications enablers; flexible air interface for scalable service delivery; millimeter-wave-based mobile radio access networks; dynamic reconfigurable optical-wireless backhaul/fronthaul with cognitive control plane for small cells and cloud-RANs; and exchange multidomain orchestration for software-defined infrastructures.
