MONTREAL – The small cell industry is rapidly maturing, motivated by a data-driven capacity crunch and increasingly widespread advances in LTE deployments, according to the latest Maravedis market report Small Cells Market Trends and Forecasts 2011-2016.
Small cells provide technology options with the potential to meet operators’ short and long-term capacity requirements amid CAPEX and OPEX constraints. As mobile operators expand the number of base stations in their networks to meet capacity requirements, they could benefit from increased price and technology competition among small cell vendors and decreasing hardware costs, according to the report.
"Adding the massive number of base stations required in the future will demand sophisticated and effective auto-configuration and auto-optimization capabilities to minimize deployment and operational costs" said Fernando Donoso, Maravedis senior analyst and lead author of the report.
Other findings include:
– The pico and carrier femto small cell market, dominated by 4G small cells, will begin to grow in earnest in mid-to-late 2012, with rapid uptake in 2013 into 2014;
– The small cell market will reach US$5 billion worldwide by 2014, approaching maturation in 2016; and
– Carrier Wi-Fi, carrier femto and pico cells will co-exist as complementary technologies, with anticipated future advances in silicon breaking down the distinctions between carrier femto cells and pico cells in two to three years.
