Issues of site acquisition, backhaul and power have been significant small cell deployment challenges, but the industry is starting to get a better handle on how to address them – and as a result, small cell deployments began to ramp up in 2015, with even more momentum expected this year.
A number of factors are contributing to getting small cell networks right, including:
Leveraging partnerships and master use agreements. “It looks as if folks have solved challenges by collaborating in ecosystems to help the customer – mobile network operators – deploy small cells,” said Nick Marshall, research director at ABI Research.
This has manifested both in third-party ownership of some small cell assets, and in other cases operators owning and operating small cells. In Verizon Wireless’ San Francisco deployment last year, for example, about 300 of the 400 nodes were built and run by infrastructure provider ExteNet Systems on behalf of Verizon, while the other 100 were Verizon’s own. Verizon recently signed a national, multi-year contract with street furniture company JCDecaux, which it utilized for the San Francisco deployment. JCDecaux claims more than 9,000 outdoor street furniture assets in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and San Francisco and has also worked with Vodafone on small cell deployments in Europe.
Fixed wireless provider Towerstream has set up partnerships with land and building owners for small cell siting, said CEO Jeff Thompson, as well as working with major infrastructure vendors. Last fall, Towerstream announced a partnership with telecom company Syscom to co-market backhaul, small cell and Wi-Fi arrangements. The deal leverages a Syscom arrangement with outdoor media company Kinetic, which owns tens of thousands of infrastructure assets, including digital billboards, to bring connectivity to those sites for multiple uses.
Tormod Larsen, CTO of ExteNet Systems, said attachment locations are one of the key success factors and making deals with utilities or municipalities to attach to a single type of structure, such as street lights, makes more sense than dealing with many private building owners – who often expect to see lease rates from small cell antennas that are comparable to macro sites.
Vendor services are streamlining small cell processes. Marshall of ABI cited programs such as the former Alcatel-Lucent’s small cell site certification program and Metro Cell Express; Nokia’s HetNet Engine Room; Ericsson’s Small Cells-as-a-Service; and Huawei’s Crowd-Sourcing Small Cell solution as small cell deployment offerings that have helped the technology gain momentum.
Each one takes a slightly different strategy on lowering deployments costs and streamlining. Taken in total, those types of solutions have helped the industry move forward on more efficient deployment processes, through a variety of better information, managed services and site and development resources.
Network design. Those vendor services are, in many cases, formalizing the effort to build a better small cell network with lower cost and faster deployment times. Whether operators leverage such services from their equipment vendors or other network service companies, there are a number of common threads in design: master use agreements to make many sites available; a fiber-first approach; and clustering to drive some cost efficiencies.
“What companies have done is take a fiber-first approach for backhaul,” said Marshall. “If they have a fiber point of presence, they’ll put the small cell on that point, even to sacrifice performance slightly – so they’ll get the initial network deployed like that, and maybe come on later and backfill with wireless backhaul arrangements.”
Lindsey Johnson, project manager with Minnesota-based Vertical Limit Construction, said clustering has been another way to build some level of scalability. Johnson said in its projects, Vertical Limit has seen small cell clusters of 10 to 15 cells being linked to one aggregation point. Unlike one-off small cells, efficiencies come from designing and installing the cells in relative bulk to cover malls and other capacity hot spots.
More familiarity with the technology. Experience is often the best teacher, and individuals and companies across the ecosystem have learned from pilot projects and trials and are leveraging those lessons to address small cell deployment challenges.
“I think people are getting better at it. There are people who have gone out, tried it and failed, and now they understand,” Thompson said.
Read more about how the industry is getting small cells right in RCR’s special report on the topic.
