Tuesday, July 28, 2026
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Network Infrastructure

Video: 3M's Steve King on cell tower technology trends

by Kelly Hill
written by Kelly Hill Share
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The jump to 4G has made a significant impact on technologies in place at cellular sites, both macro and small cell, according to Steve King, applications engineer with 3M.
“If I had to summarize what I see happening right now particularly in North America, and the U.S. marketplace, it would be all about what we call densification. Network densification,” King said in a video interview with RCR’s Kelly Hill.
King talks about major macro site investment initiatives at the national carriers, and how site architectures are changing in order to support ever faster networks with ever more capacity, as well as the influence of newly emerging TDD-LTE networks with much more complicated antennas, and small cells.
“The point of all this is that what we see at the macro site is more and  more infrastructure trying to support the demands of the mobile workforce, the wireless data growth that we’re seeing,” King said.
King addresses trends in installation best practices and his work with the IWPC; increases in energy efficiency vs. changing loads on the tower and tower mounts; and upcoming trends such as cloud RAN architectures, smart sites with increased M2M monitoring for macro sites, and edge data caching in order to speed up network content delivery.
Watch the in-depth video interview:

Want more insight on tower technology trends? Download RCR’s recent special report on the topic. You can also check out another feature on network decommissioning. 
Follow me on Twitter: @khillrcr

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Kelly Hill reports on network test and measurement, AI infrastructure and regulatory issues, including spectrum, for RCR Wireless News. She began covering the wireless industry in 2005, focusing on carriers and MVNOs, then took a few years’ hiatus and returned to RCR Wireless News to write about heterogeneous networks (remember those?) and network infrastructure. Kelly is an Ohio native with a masters degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, where she focused on science writing and multimedia. She has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, The Oregonian and The Canton Repository. She lives in northern Virginia, not far from Data Center Alley.

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