DALLAS – The demand for small cells is pressing, and carriers, venue owners and other stakeholders are racing to deploy. But scalability remains a challenge as it’s inherently difficult to define a broad process when each small cell use case has its own set of requirements.
RCR Wireless News caught up with industry thought leaders Jack MacLeod, president of Gray Beards Consulting, and Hillol Roy, a partner at IBB Consulting, to discuss the market outlook for small cells as well as some of the attendant challenges during the Small Cells Americas conference in Dallas.
MacLeod is part of a group developing solutions to issues facing the small cells market. Following the recent PCIA HetNet Expo in Los Angeles, MacLeod contributed to the formation of five working groups focused on the topics of market education and navigating municipal planning/zoning processes, among others.
The goal is to examine “cost elements that are prohibiting or being a major hurdle to the deployment of small cells,” MacLeod said. “One of them is an educational issue. What that working group is designed to do is to coordinate with the wireless CIO industry. The CIOs are going to have to contribute to this and understand what a small cell is. It’s not a macro cell and that’s basically the problem right now in the metropolitan areas with zoning and planning. They look at this as a macro cell.”
As to coming up with a uniform process to deal with varying local planning/zoning laws, MacLeod said that’s “a very significant problem. There’s no uniformity to the zoning and planning processes. Hopefully we can address the issue with some model ordinances that would be applicable to small cell. One of the carriers suggested that small cell should only require an electrical permit, period, full stop. IT makes sense. It’s no bigger than the signage on front of Joe’s Shoe Repair Shop.”
Roy equated Wi-Fi access points to “unlicensed small cell,” then explained the supply and demand variables that will open up the “licensed small cell” market.
He said small cells require backhaul, power and mounting, three things fixed-line MSO already have, whereas MNOs have spectrum and a mobile core, but no access to backhaul, power and mounting.
“Now the question comes that when do all these factors come together so that we can see licensed small cell deployment? So, inevitably, whenever you have to bring too many things together the dollar figures in. So the mobile operators are wondering: Do we have a market for the small cell?”
That goes to the demand side. Roy said the increasing demand for mobile data does not equate to a proportionate increase in revenue to operators.
“We feel the demand there will come from a different data sector, which you call premium data. Self-driving cars, latency-sensitive enterprise applications where you need highly reliable, secure, low-latency data. There you need licensed band.”
