Enterprises and businesses around the world are increasingly adopting small cells as they become aware of the benefits. As business becomes increasingly dependent on high quality mobile connections, organizations of all sizes are looking to deploy small cells to deliver improved coverage, capacity and to offer innovative solutions.
According to a previous study by the Small Cell Forum, a high number of organizations across all sectors have shown interests in the deployment of small cells but many still remain unclear on the benefits offered by these solutions. This represents a big opportunity for vendors and service providers to educate the market and provide small cell solutions to improve the quality of mobile services in the enterprise segment.
According to the Small Cell Forum, the logistics and distribution industry, as well as the retail sector are currently experiencing high levels of small cells adoption. The industry group also said a significant number of surveyed companies said they were interested in small cells as they would provide better connectivity for app-based services.
Small Cell Forum’s research study also highlighted that businesses are moving to a mobile-first environment and need the coverage, capacity and security that can be provided by a carrier-grade small cell deployment. The report also revealed businesses are also looking for advances from within the small cell industry. In particular, organizations would prefer multi-operator small cells and closer integration with Wi-Fi services.
In its latest Release 8 documentation, which was unveiled in November 2016, the Small Cell Forum makes the case for using sharing models to enable enterprises to take advantage of small cells. The key to multi-operator small cells, according to the industry advocacy group, is virtualization – separating the network functions from the radio and moving management and optimization to the cloud.
Taking into account the bring-your-own-device trend, most enterprises require a multi-operator solution.
“In BYOD environments, the opportunity for an in-building enterprise solution to offer coverage and capacity from a plurality of network operators can be seen as beneficial as it is able to support the widest range of devices and associated subscriptions,” the report states. Then, for a nationwide enterprise, employees “may find themselves operating in markets that are preferentially covered by one particular operator and in other markets where the spectrum allocations favor another operator.”
Again, having a choice of operators is a boon to business.
Further, in the case of an enterprise that uses temporary employees or contractors, multi-operator access is needed. And, according to Release 8, sometimes an enterprise may need to provide service for the general public.
“Examples include shopping malls, concert venues, transport hubs, health care environments, education establishments, etc. In such environments, the enterprise may desire to offer services to all their visitors, irrespective of carrier affiliation,” the organization noted.
These examples highlight the need for enterprises to deploy a multi-operator small cell scheme in support of a range of enterprise activities.
