A name change can do a lot to help a re-alignment and this is clearly what the Small Cell Forum is hoping for, now that it’s killed off the femtocell moniker. This is vaguely reminiscent of a 1980s political-correctness initiative—as if the ‘Femto’ prefix had somehow become pejorative, inviting abuse from passers-by at trade shows—and it’s clearly designed to bring down the barriers between Big Infra and the smaller ex-femto crowd.

This was confirmed by the announcement that, with the name change, Ericsson has joined the Forum’s board. Acquisition must be the intended exit strategy for the likes of IP Access and Ubiquisys (with PicoChip already snapped up by Mind Stream) so, like Lana Del Rey, the ex-femtos are trying to make themselves more appealing to the market. The aim is to live rather than being born to die.

That’s about where the comparison runs out of legs, though. Del Rey appears to have achieved much of her successful transformation by resolving to wear exclusively skimpy outfits—and by having so much collagen injected into her lips that it looks like she’s been hit in the face by a stray football. Recent viewings of the ex-femtos show no evidence of hot pants or plastic surgery. That will come next, if the name change doesn’t work. Let’s hope the name change works.

The Informer reckons you could do worse than have 20 quid on Ericsson making a purchase in this space—now that it’s cut needy Sony Ericsson out of its life. Ericsson’s extrication from that awkward situation became complete on Thursday this week. The Informer wonders if it sent a good luck card to Sony, which is now facing its first solo trip to Mobile World Congress in a long, long time.

Maybe it can make a positive impression by announcing that it’s pre-loading Whitney Houston’s entire back catalogue for free on all handsets from now on, after its sister company upset the grieving millions by upping the price of her greatest hits album moments after news of her death broke (although you’d expect her biggest fans to already own all her music). Blimey that was quick, wasn’t it? Do you think Sony has some kind of algorithm that scours the web for musical deaths and then adjusts the prices accordingly?

Most people don’t give a monkey’s about the infinite cynicisms of global capitalism – many of which are pretty tasteless – but somehow increasing the price of an asset that had just gained significant rarity value is beyond the pale. Yeah, sure, we should be sensitive to the fact that Whitney Houston was popular and lots of people loved her music. But let’s not forget that she did some truly dreadful things in her life, which remain deeply offensive to this day. The Bodyguard, for example.

So there’s a lot of love in the US for Whitney right now, but not so much for LightSquared. Try as it might the aspiring LTE wholesaler just cannot curry favour with the powers that be, in thrall as they are to US GPS operators and users.

The FCC said this week that it plans to suspend indefinitely a conditional waiver that would allow LightSquared to build its LTE network. The decision was based on a recommendation from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which found that “LightSquared’s proposed mobile broadband network will impact GPS services and that there is no practical way to mitigate the potential interference at this time.” While the NTIA conceded that technological work-arounds are feasible, it argued that they couldn’t be achieved in time to coincide with LightSquared’s planned deployment.

The keen-to-be-operator hit back, claiming that the GPS community strong-armed the NTIA (and that community contains the armed forces, so it’s not inconceivable) and that the testing process was “severely flawed”.

It’s starting to look like LightSquared might never get its project up and running, which would be bad news for Sprint, which had struck an $11bn deal with LightSquared to deploy the LTE network on its behalf, so it could wholesale LTE capacity back to Sprint and other operators.

Sticking with regulatory behaviour, the European Commission has this week given its blessing to Google’s acquisition of Motorola’s handset unit. The EC’s principal concern was whether or not the deal would see Google excluding other Android vendors in Moto’s favour, which leads on to two points: First, if that’s the EC’s principal concern about what Google’s up to, it had better have another think about things and, second, if Google was going to pick up a vendor in a bid to try and storm the hardware market, it would probably not have gone for Motorola.

In fact, read as an analysis of the thinking behind the acquisition, the EC release is damning in that it can’t seem to locate a single strategic advantage in the deal. It essentially concludes that Google can already do pretty much what it wants to, and that adding Motorola Mobility to the mix will make such a small addition to its already vast momentum as to be almost undetectable.

Matters regulatory didn’t work out so well for UK operators Vodafone and Everything Everywhere this week, which would have done well to heed Kenny Rogers’ observation that you’ve got to know when to hold. Just under a year ago UK regulator Ofcom ruled that termination rates should be cut from just over £0.04/minute in 2010 to less than £0.0065/minute by 2015. Up in arms at this assault on a lucrative revenue stream, the two operators, with support from O2, appealed to the Competition Appeals Tribunal (CAT).

This week the CAT did what CATs do when they’re unimpressed; it raised its haughty tail and showed the operators its… opinion, ruling that Ofcom had not, in fact, been aggressive enough. Vodafone et al will now have to meet the pricing targets by 2014, a year earlier than they were originally required to. That’s the thing about CATs; you just can’t trust them. If the UK TI’s Department of Grievances had been making the call, it would have worked out differently. The DoG rolls over every time.

Norway’s Telenor has been busy with disputes of its own this week, demanding compensation from Indian partner Unitech in the wake of the Indian 2G licence fiasco, as well as filing lawsuits against Nokia Siemens and Huawei in Pakistan. It’s not clear exactly what these suits concern, although there was supposed to be a managed services deal between Telenor and Huawei in Pakistan.

Against the backdrop of all this corporate jostling, the operator has ended one if its longest-running feuds, withdrawing all claims against Russia’s Altimo. The firms are partners in international player VimpelCom and this week Telenor bagged 234 million preferred shares in the Netherlands headquartered multinational from Weather Investments for $374m. This takes Telenor’s voting share in the firm to 36.36 per cent which is apparently enough to soothe its attitude to Altimo.

Over in France another cohabitation has gone sour, with Orange complaining that Iliad subsidiary Free Mobile is eating more than its fair share of the minutes. The clue is in Iliad’s naming strategy, as the firm has offered its ADSL customers free calls on its mobile network. Except the calls aren’t happening on Free’s mobile network, they’re happening on Orange’s.

Orange entered into a net share with Free that came into effect once Free’s own network had reached 27 per cent of the population. However, it is estimated that 97 per cent of calls made by the two million-strong Free Mobile customer base are carried by Orange. “When you put such extreme offers on the market, it is obvious that demand will be high and this was very largely under-anticipated by Free,” an Orange bod told Telecoms.com.

Meanwhile Orange has agreed to buy the majority  of the personal stake in Egyptian carrier Mobinil held by Naguib Sawiris. The deal takes the Orange stake in Mobinil to 71.25 per cent.

There were a couple of mobile financial services deals this week. UK carrier O2 signed up with Sybase365 for the development of a mobile wallet solution, while UK bank Barclays got in on the act with a new service called Pingit.

The service allows users to tie their mobile number to their current (or checking) bank account, enabling them to send money back and forth using nothing more complicated than a text message. The Pingit app is available on iOS, Android and Blackberry – wot no Windows? – and will initially only be usable by Barclays customers. This is a short term thing, though, and it will be available to all UK banking customers by March.

This is a very interesting service and one that we’ll be hearing a lot more about on Telecoms.com in the near future, so keep your eyes peeled.

And that’s about it for this week, apart from an update on the threat of a public transport strike in Barcelona during Mobile World Congress. The GSMA put out a statement this week saying that its “senior executives” are in Barcelona and have “advised the government authorities that they should do everything to avert the strike”. The Informer supposes it’s that kind of strategic thinking that separates the senior execs from the rest of us.

Meanwhile there is apparently a “comprehensive contingency plan” but it’s a secret. Perhaps the senior execs are busy rounding up the donkeys of Catalonia.

Take care

The Informer.

Small cells have grown up and left home

Femtocells have grown up and left home, according to ip.access founder and CTO Nick Johnson, commenting on the news Wednesday that the Femto Forum had rebranded as the Small Cell Forum. Johnson was unveiling the firm’s first 4G small cell – an event that highlights the growing maturing of the sector – yet brings with it some interesting network planning considerations.

The firm’s E-100 is an LTE access point built on Freescale’s QorlQ Qonverge base-station-on-a-chip unit, and is capable of supporting 64 LTE users and 32 3G users simultaneously, with an additional interface for a wifi module. The device will be sent out to operator labs later this year with field trials to start in early 2013.

But with potentially tens of thousands of small cells appearing in the network topology, there’s a real danger that the SON (self organising network) elements will be overwhelmed by the requests.

A SON implementation is designed to allow the network to automatically and continually self optimise by passing instructions back to the basestations telling them to reconfigure certain parameters. Eventually, implementations will go so far as to allow the network to ‘self heal’.

However, Andy Tiller, SVP of product management at ip.access, pointed out that the small cell layer could quite easily hog the SON functionality due to the sheer number of small cells present. As a result, ip.access has devised a sort of aggregation layer which sits in between the SON and the small cell layer and called it the NOS (network orchestration system).

The NOS allows clusters of small cells to be managed in the context of the whole network, passing down KPI-based optimisations directed by the SON, and sidestepping a network management headache.

The Femto Forum has changed its name to the Small Cell Forum

The Femto Forum has announced that it has changed its name to the Small Cell Forum, as it look to bring all outdoor small cell technologies under its umbrella. Small Cell Forum chair Simon Saunders told Telecoms.com that the new name would better reflect its work, which embraces residential, enterprise, metro and rural small cells in addition to indoor Femtocells. “There are no hard boundaries between different categories of cells.” Saunders said.

He said that the expanded outlook beyond residential devices had encouraged telecoms vendor Ericsson to join the board.

One of the main areas of focus for the forum moving forward would be to concentrate on improving the handover between different technologies, such as the crossover between small cells and wifi, cloud RAN and distributed antenna systems. It would also focus on the practical challenges around deployment, such as locating sites, delivering power and providing backhaul.

“There are no operators that don’t see a really strong role for small cells” Saunders said, backed up by an Informa survey which said last year that last 60 per cent of operators see small cells as more important for LTE than macro cells.

He also claimed that small cells would be critical in bringing LTE to rural areas thanks to the lower cost of rolling them out compared to traditional macro cells. “It’s simply more cost effective for an operator to make use of a small cell than a macro cell,” said Saunders. “In normal roll-out plans LTE would come to rural areas very late in the day, whereas with small cells you can bring LTE to a small town or village very early in the LTE life cycle. LTE pervades much of what we do technically. In contrast to 3G, when femtos came along afterwards, with LTE we’ve been able to embed those small cell techniques from the very beginning.”

Saunders comments were echoes by Informa analyst Dimitri Mavrakis, who said in a blog post that, “Small Cells – through operator interest, vendor activities and now the Small Cell Forum – will be much more important than femtocells and will be a key component of LTE and subsequent radio networks.”

The LTE World Summit is taking place on the 23-24 May 2012 CCIB, Barcelona, Spain. Click here to register your interest.

Small cells were a big thing during last year’s MWC but obviously there are several technical and business challenges to overcome before they become mainstream. Nevertheless, small cells are particularly useful in many situations where operators need low-mobility and/or high capacity coverage and these are the areas now targeted by the Small Cell Forum.

Home of the femtocell

Femtocells have been established in the home environment, albeit not as widely as the industry or analysts expected, primarily due to high costs for Femtocell Access Points (FAP) and cultural issues at operators’ planning departments. Femtocell shipments are estimated to have reached the 2 million mark sometime during half-2011 largely driven by residential applications and Vodafone, AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Sprint are examples of large scale femtocell deployments which use the technology for coverage blackspots.

Coverage was expected to be only the first step in a femtocell deployment. The next steps were capacity offload followed by femtocell specific services (primarily location driven) which did not materialize in time, perhaps due to the success of wifi for traffic offload and the uncertainty in the business success of femtocell services.

In a way, residential femtocells have become a commodity which are indirectly associated with the operator business case through churn reduction and improved user experience, but this may not be enough for many operators, thus limiting economies of scale which would bring down femtocell costs considerably. Since femtocells have found their “home” market – which is smaller than expected – what’s the logical next step for the evolution of the technology, the Femto Forum and relevant vendors?

The “bigger” picture

The Small Cell Forum will now cover residential, urban, enterprise and rural small cells which present a much bigger market and elevate the addressable cell size from femto to pico, metro and even micro. Each of these key markets present interesting challenges but also provide considerable growth opportunities for femtocell and larger infrastructure vendors. Indeed, rural small cells and metrocells address two key areas that were largely driven by bigger macro cells while small cells can create the necessary economies to promote faster and more aggressive deployment.

The challenges facing the Small Cell Forum have now increased in breadth:

[The Small Cell Forum] will also support the crossover between small cells and other relevant technologies including: Wi-Fi, cloud RAN (which connects cellular radio to cloud-based intelligence over fibre), Distributed Antenna Systems, as well as macrocells as part of the new heterogeneous network (hetnet) environment.

The role of the Small Cell Forum will be to tackle the practical challenges facing deployment. This includes finding appropriate small cell sites; delivering power and backhaul; managing interactions between small cells, macrocells and other wireless technologies; and effective interoperability and network management.

These practical challenges are formidable, albeit necessary to be addressed for the successful and quick rollout of small cells in the market. The role of the Small Cell Forum is now closer to the mobile operator business case through these practical issues and also closer to traditional deployment mechanisms rather than user-installed, auto-provisioned Customer Premises Equipment (CPE).

So in a way, the Small Cell Forum graduates from infancy and enters a more challenging world that comes with many problems to solve. Small Cells – through operator interest, vendor activities and now the Small Cell Forum – will be much more important than femtocells and will be a key component of LTE and subsequent radio networks. Small cells are not a new concept; cell splitting has been widely used to tackle capacity-constrained areas and small cells capitalize on the need for capacity or coverage infill to complete the technology and practical issues as outlined above by the Small Cell Forum.

Small cell base stations are set to play an important role

A growth in markets with multiple femtocell offerings is driving operators to offer the products for free, according to a new study from Informa Telecoms & Media. Femtocell services are currently available in 23 countries around the world, and 43 per cent of these countries have multiple operators offering the technology, the firm said. For the majority of these countries, at least one operator offers the devices free of charge.

Informa identified that the growth is being driven by the falling costs of femtocell technology as economies of scale and competition increase. Over the past quarter, important progress has been made in the evolution of femto chipsets with new launches from Cavium, Freescale, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments. These join existing chipset vendors – Broadcom, DesignArt, Picochip and Mindspeed.

“We are seeing evidence that once one operator deploys femtocells in a market there is strong pressure on its competitors to offer a rival service. This competition is in turn starting to drive free femtocell offers as operators look to differentiate their services. These free offers have become commercially viable as the costs associated with femtocells start to fall due to vendor competition and economies of scale,” said Dimitris Mavrakis, principal analyst at Informa.

New femtocell deployments in the past quarter include Vodafone Netherlands, Vodafone Czech Republic, Vimpelcom in Russia and Cosmote in Greece. There are currently 36 femtocell deployments globally, 14 further commitments, and, as of June 2011, in excess of 2.3 million femtocells active both privately in homes and offices, as well as publically in metropolitan and rural environments.

There are more 3G femtocells than conventional 3G base stations globally and Informa forecasts growth to continue with 48 million access points in use globally by 2014. Eight of the top ten mobile operator groups by revenue offer femtocell services, including AT&T, France Telecom, NTT DoCoMo, Sprint, Telefónica, Deutsche Telecom, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone.

The expansion of the femtocell industry is also reflected in the growing membership of the Femto Forum, the femtocell industry association. Its newest members include Asahikasei Microdevices Eircom, Femtocell Communications Zimbabwe, Free Mobile, Idirect, Nomor, Polska Telefonia Cyfrowa S.A. and TOT PCL. The Forum’s membership includes 70 vendors and 66 mobile operators representing over 1.94 billion mobile subscribers worldwide, across multiple wireless technologies and accounts for 34 per cent of total mobile subscribers worldwide.

All of the major infrastructure vendors have announced some degree of support for small cells in their product portfolios, be it picocell, femtocell, small-cell RAN, wifi or a combination of these. But far from being purely vendor driven, the need to rethink the macro model is getting equally strong support from mobile operators, many of whom have already embraced small cells through their growing use of alternative technologies such as wireless LANs and femtocells as a means of offloading data traffic from the cellular network or extending coverage.

Judging by the deliberations at Informa Telecoms & Media’s Small Cells World Congress in Berlin (October 11-12) a consensus already exists that adherence to the macro-cell network model cannot in itself provide sufficient capacity to meet future traffic demand. But that doesn’t make small cells a done deal, and it was clear that there are more questions than answers when it comes to implementing a small cell strategy.

Key areas of concern for the delegates in Berlin included how to make the best choice of small cell technology, tackling interference issues, hotspot identification (in order to better target small cell deployments), backhaul provision, managing small cells in a multi-vendor environment, handover between the macro network and small cell sites, self-organizing capabilities (SONs), and the challenges of distributed architectures and cloud-RAN.

Wifi/femtocell convergence

Wifi remains very much on the agenda for many mobile operators, but there was a clear desire to integrate the technology more closely with cellular both in terms of ease of use (network discovery, authentication and log-on) and at the core network level. Femtocells were generally agreed to have fewer integration challenges in terms of authentication and security than wifi, but interference problems between what some regarded as “unplanned” consumer femtocell deployments and the macro network remained a concern for some operators, notably Deutsche Telekom and Orange.

Vodafone, on the other hand, reported a largely positive experience with its consumer femtocell offering, which it has now launched in twelve markets including most recently the Czech Republic and the Netherlands. Despite having been deployed initially to improve voice coverage, the operator said that femtos were also having the effect of driving up data usage and reducing churn. Vodafone is already extending femtocells into the enterprise and evolving the technology for outdoor networks, and says that femtocells will feature as part of a future LTE rollout.

Most speakers, Vodafone included, subscribed to the now widely shared view that femtocells and wifi can be complementary. With the majority of today’s femtocell deployments addressing voice coverage, some operators remain unconvinced that the technology can provide a viable platform for data. However, there was broad agreement that achieving a greater degree of harmonization between femtocells and wifi could exploit the strengths of both technologies while minimizing concerns about their perceived shortcomings.

The news that industry bodies including the Femto Forum, the Wi-Fi Alliance and the Wireless Broadband Association are co-operating shows that old rivalries have clearly been buried. For its part, the Femto Forum envisages a new balance between Wi-Fi and femtocell usage in a smart combination to provide “fine-grained offload” and a better customer experience.

One practical application of femtocell/wifi convergence was recently demonstrated by combining the femtocell’s SIM-based authentication and billing capabilities with wifi as a delivery mechanism for high-volume data such as video content.  The introduction of integrated femtocell/wifi access points such as Contela’s product for Korea’s SKT (co-developed with Picochip) is further evidence that the technologies are converging, and in Berlin Huawei confirmed that it now has a commercial, integrated femtocell/wifi product for providing improved coverage and latency for in-building systems.

Outstanding issues

The “to do” list for small cells to be successful is extensive, however, particularly with regard to integration with the macro level. Initially this means improved radio planning, simplified field installation and set-up, and smarter handover and cell-load management. Also under discussion were the implementation of  QoS and policy management in small cell networks , and support for multi-vendor heterogeneous-network.

Some of these areas will be addressed through the use of self-organizing networks (SONs), for example, by providing the capability for newly-installed cells to self-configure and self-optimize in relation to neighbouring cells and the prevailing radio environment. In the heterogeneous network, SON support within a multi-vendor small cell environment will be crucial.

Network Norway, which is already using SONs as part of its enterprise femtocell offering, says these capabilities can also be applied in public (outdoor) small-cell networks. Deutsche Telekom wants to extend SON functionality to provide the option of powering down small cell sites during periods of low usage such as overnight.

Alcatel-Lucent called for greater flexibility in the management of handover between the macro and small cells within its coverage area, pointing out that incoming handover to the hotspot would not be necessary in cases where the user was passing through the small cell area and could be retained on the macro network. This would require fewer limitations on the definition of target cells as contained in the current standards, the vendor argued.

Several speakers also agreed that the accurate pinpointing of hotspots – down to 50 metres – was an important requirement that the industry needs to address.

Hetnets & Cloud RAN

The goal of the truly heterogeneous network where multiple small cell technologies provide seamless layers of coverage within the macro environment may be some way off, but vendors speaking in Berlin were keen to outline the advantages of a coordinated approach in maximising the potential capacity and performance gains.

Huawei pointed to improvements in cell throughput in excess of four times that of the macro, that could be achieved with effective interference coordination in hetnets, while Alcatel-Lucent presented examples of performance gains achievable with the densification of small cells, and talked of the importance of load balancing between cells, and precision small-cell deployment. Modelling by Bellabs showed a potential TCO saving of up to 55 per cent over 5-years for a small cell deployment versus the macrocell alternative

From the operator side, Deutsche Telekom stressed the need for policy management capabilities to be implemented on a local basis, and said that the tools were coming for operators to implement policy in hetnets.

Speakers and delegates alike were cautious on the subject of Cloud RAN architectures that separate the remote radio head and antenna from the cell’s baseband processing functionality. One major concern related to backhaul, or more specifically the challenge of supporting so-called “fronthauling” between the baseband pool and the remote radio unit.

Deutsche Telekom said that while current trials of a Cloud RAN solution in China would benefit from the availability of fibre, its own situation was different, and it lacked the ability to provide “endless capacity”. Hence the operator is looking for a “middle way” somewhere between a cloud RAN and a BTS-on-a-mast approach.

Shahram Niri, director of global LTE strategy, NEC

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the current data boom is only the beginning of a far greater explosion. But while the industry is looking to LTE to address this issue, Japanese vendor NEC argues that the new technology, too, is just the first step to coping with the looming capacity crisis.

For Dr Shahram G Niri, director of global LTE/SAE strategy & solution at NEC Europe and visiting professor at the University of Surrey, one key element of the solution will be small cells—compact, low power base stations that can be deployed more easily, more quickly and more cost efficiently in data hotspots than their large-scale counterparts. “At NEC we believe that small cells are a whole new way of building future mobile broadband networks,” Niri says. “They add massive capacity, in a very fast time, with a TCO which is absolutely a key to sustainability of mobile broadband business.” In fact, he believes that they will prove to be nothing less than essential as operators bid to stay ahead of growth.

“The challenge is that we have more users, more smartphones, more connected devices and more data hungry and video-centric applications. There’s no doubt that traffic is increasing and it is increasing exponentially. It is going to be a continuous challenge to stay ahead of traffic increases.” The most straightforward solution would be additional spectrum, but acquiring and deploying that spectrum is a major challenge for operators. Niri believes, though, that even if this were not the case, spectrum alone would not be sufficient to deal with the capacity issue.

“Spectrum is a resource that’s finite, and very expensive, and very hard to harmonise across regions,” he says. “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you double the amount of spectrum available for mobile broadband between now and five or 10 years’ time. You double the capacity, [but] you are looking at scenarios where traffic increases somewhere between a minimum of a hundred to a few hundred times. How are we going to cope with that? The spectrum shortage is a real problem and industry needs to look more seriously into this.”

Technology advances such as higher order modulation; coding, clever scheduling and MIMO won’t be enough to deal with this capacity crunch, Niri says and the barrier is the laws of physics. “We are reaching the upper limits of spectral efficiency in terms of the amount of bits we could really squeeze from every MHz of spectrum.”

Adding more macro cells is not the answer either, he says. “The current macro networks are complex, costly to operate and still will not deliver the desired performance. New network topologies and deployment methods will offer more gains than new technologies and hardware. Frequency reuse is the key to keeping up with the exponential increase of traffic in the future.”

The answer to the problem, he says, is small cells, and the efficient way they use the networks. NEC says its tests have shown that small cells can deliver around three times the throughput of a typical network of macro cells. Small cells with low power radios are designed to support a limited number of subscribers – usually in the tens and hundreds rather than thousands of macro base stations, but conversely they are also faster, simpler, more efficient and more cost-effective.

“Small cells are moving right to the heart of the network,” Niri says. “And they are a good solution because they help to drive the cost down. At the same time they improve the user experience, add value and help to increase revenue.”

Naturally, other vendors have also seen the potential of small cells, so what is it that NEC believes gives it an advantage in the market?

A combination of innovative and solid products and real world calls deployment experience, says Niri. “At NEC we are pioneers in small cell solutions. We’ve been at the forefront of this paradigm shift.”

Niri cites the firm’s operator engagements, particularly in its home market of Japan. “I think this goes back to our experience in mobile broadband. We’ve were behind the first 3G network in the world in Japan in 2001 – the leading broadband market. We were behind the first 3G network in Europe in 2003. We’ve also had a lot of success in pioneering 3G femtos [combined] with a deep understanding of mobile broadband.”

Then there’s NEC’s small cell technology itself, he says. “What we’ve done in small cell technology is to make a really compact and really high performance and intelligent product. And we’ve done it earlier than anybody else – I believe that we are a good year if not more ahead of the others.”

The challenge, Niri believes, is simply getting the small cell message across to the market and explaining that what worked for 3G won’t necessarily work in a data-centric 4G world; for LTE, operators will need to take a different tack.

“The tradition is to use macro for deployment— this has been the operators‘ bread and butter. In 3G, this made sense, as coverage was the driver—but then capacity became an issue when mobile broadband picked up. Yes, even today small cell technology is used in 3G, but what we’ve said to our customers is that the network dynamics are totally different. Coverage is not an issue—capacity, cost and performance are issues ,and they cannot be addressed with macro cells.

“Small cells are not a coverage solution—they are primarily a good way of providing a lot of capacity and superior performance at a lower TCO. [So] what we’re saying to customers is that it is the other way round to 3G. Build the capacity layer using small cells and then use macro to do out-fill to improve the coverage. This is a change in mind set.”

So do operators generally need educating over the benefits that small cells can bring? Niri believes they do.“We had to do a lot of hard work, all the way from theoretical simulations to business cases and TCO analysis to try and convince that this was a true solution. But through these joint analyses we have formed a very good understanding [with operators].”

Finally, Niri says that the received wisdom that the flat IP architecture of LTE simplifies the network maintenance is false.

“I simply challenge those who say that future networks will be simpler because you have a flat IP infrastructure. In fact, we are going to have more complex networks [offering] extreme mobility, ubiquity and personalisation. [They will be] video dominated and [deliver] surprising applications as yet unimagined. How could this network be simpler?”

The challenge Niri says is to design a network that masks the complexity as much as possible, yet offers intelligence, availability, resilience and speed—and all at a lower cost. It’s a tall order but one that Niri believes is necessary—and small cells will play a crucial role.

“We will surely see one touch and zero touch [plug and play] zero footprint small cells equipped with very intelligent SON in a variety of micro, pico and femto forms play a very big, if not the main, role in the evolution of mobile broadband,”he says.

The world’s first Small Cells event takes place in Berlin, Germany on 11-12th  October 2011

Small cell base stations are set to play an important role

With mobile data traffic expected to double annually, small cell base stations are set to play an important role in expanding the capacity of wireless networks. Mobile operators are realizing that to meet the demands for data, video and application access caused by smart phones and other devices, there is a real beauty to going small.

Small cells provide flexibility and increased QoS capabilities at an attractive cost. Implementing a small cell infrastructure is also more environmentally friendly as it will reduce the number of cell towers (maybe even eventually eliminate them) and it provides a cleaner signal with less power.

But going small is the answer to just one part of the equation. The ability to interact with today’s macro networks as well as effectively backhaul small cells is another.

Compact base stations (C-BTS) have been referred to by several nomenclatures such as micro and pico base stations. They are small size, fully integrated base stations that include baseband processing and radio module in one physical unit. They are relatively light in weight (e.g. a few kilograms) and are easy to deploy and maintain. They come with varying output power ranging from a half-watt to a few watts.

They are provisioned to support a limited number of subscribers that range in the tens of subscribers. These features separate them from larger ‘macro’ base stations that typically have a split or all-indoor architecture in addition to larger capabilities in terms of output power and number of supported subscribers. Thus, it is common to deploy compact base stations at relatively low height (e.g. 10-15 meters) to cover a limited area (e.g. 100 meter) to provide capacity to a hot spot or coverage in a dead zone. Macro base stations on the other hand are mounted higher at 30-45 meters, for example, and used to provide wider coverage (e.g. 500 meters or more).

Despite the differences in architecture and form-factor, the data rate that a large or small base station can support is the same. This is the link-level data rate that is measured in a lab environment, in the absence of interference. The link-level rate is determined by the capability of the wireless access technology such as WCDMA or LTE.

However, what matters to wireless network operators and subscribers alike is the actual performance of a wireless network. Hence, network-level performance is the real measure with link-level performance being an upper-bound that’s only reached in ideal scenarios seldom present in a real deployment.

Small cell base stations provide higher capacity than macro cells because of the deployment scenario. Because these base stations are mounted low above ground, they are less susceptible to interference. This translates directly into higher capacity.

Higher signal quality leads to better throughput because it allows the system to use a more spectrally efficient transmission scheme where more bits can be transmitted at the same time.  Therefore, the areas where users can transmit and receive at higher data rate are larger in a small cell than a macro cell. This is significant because it leads directly to a large increase in overall capacity: the capacity of small cell base station is about 89 per cent higher than that of a macro cell.

Additional benefits include:

1-    Lower delay: users will experience lower latency for data services and will enjoy faster download and upload time.

2-    In-building coverage: small cells provide better outdoor-to-indoor coverage. Considering that 40 per cent of mobile traffic originates from home and 25 per cent from work, this can represent a significant source of revenue for network operators.

3-    Better cell-edge coverage: Macro base stations provide poor service at the cell edge which includes a large percentage of the cell area. Small cells provide better cell-edge performance, particularly for the uplink than large cells.

The fact that small cells provide almost double the capacity of a macro cell is why they are set to become an important part in addressing the capacity crunch in wireless networks.

However, small cell base stations have met with challenges from a business case perspective even though they can be made at a fraction of the cost of larger base stations. The issue is how to backhaul such base stations and the cost of the backhaul. As these base stations are mounted low above ground, typical microwave systems are not technically effective because they require a clear line-of-sight between the two nodes of the microwave link – which is difficult to provide in urban areas where small cells are deployed below building rooflines. Alternatively, fiber is expensive to lay as it may not be available at the spot where the small cell is required in addition to large monthly fees that make it unattractive from an economical perspective.

Frank Rayal is VP of Product Management at backhaul supplier BLiNQ Networks

What do you think about small cells? Add your comments below.

There are now 31 commercial femtocell services worldwide which represents over 60 per cent growth in deployments in the past quarter alone. This market growth is reflected in the fact that eight of the top 10 mobile operator groups (by revenue) now offer femtocell services, which includes AT&T Group, France Telecom Group, NTT DOCOMO Group, Sprint, Telefonica Group, Deutsche Telecom Group, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone Group. Furthermore, in the vast majority of these markets, the devices now outnumber all generations of cell sites.

Informa forecasts this growth to continue with 48 million access points in use globally by 2014. Where last quarter Informa noted the recent growth in enterprise femtocell usage, this quarter has been notable due to the growth in femtocells for public access, especially as a means for speeding up mobile broadband in busy areas as exemplified by SK Telecom’s pure data offload strategy. The technology is also expected to grow in 4G networks with 60 per cent of operators believing that small cells will be more important than macrocells for an effective LTE deployment strategy according to a recent Informa survey.

“Femtocells haven’t just passed a major milestone – it is now apparent that they are rapidly becoming less of a differentiator for service providers and more like an essential offering. Consumers are increasingly going to expect something that for a long time seemed impossible – near ubiquitous coverage for voice and high speed data. Femtocells make this a very real possibility,” said Dimitris Mavrakis, Senior Analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media.

Furthermore, the past quarter has also seen important progress in femtocell technology. The first industry-wide agreed set of API specifications for advanced mobile applications based on femtocell technology have been published. The API provides awareness information so developers can incorporate enhanced presence, context and location-sensitive features into new and existing apps, and can also take advantage of the lower cost and faster data connections enabled by femtocells.

The expansion of the femtocell industry is also reflected in the growing membership of the Femto Forum, the femtocell industry association, which now includes 74 vendors and 63 mobile operators representing over 1.71 billion mobile subscribers worldwide, across multiple wireless technologies (WiMAX, UMTS and CDMA) and accounts for 33 per cent of total mobile subscribers worldwide.

The report is updated on a quarterly basis and is published free of charge on the Femto Forum’s website here.

Ubiquisys said its new Intel powered small cells will offer new levels of compute power for local caching

Ubiquisys, the femtocell vendor, has announced a partnership with chip manufacturer Intel to develop a new range of intelligent small cell base stations. The devices will feature Ubiquisys application software and will be powered by Intel architecture.

The small cells will be available in a variety of configurations and will be powered either by Intel Atom, Core, or Xeon processors depending on operator requirements. They will run WCDMA, LTE and wifi in the same box and according to Ubiquisys will bring new levels of compute power to the femtocell sector.

“What we’re talking about today is a completely new type of small cell”, Keith Day, VP Marketing of Ubiquisys told Telecoms.com. “The Intel powered cells have powerful computing capacity and abundant storage so they have the ability to do things that small cells simply haven’t been able to before.”

The cells are designed to cache local data enabling faster performance for end users. It will also help to significantly reduce the strain on operator networks, thus lowering their backhaul costs.

As an example Day described a scenario where a football stadium offered video highlights to all match attendees with the content stored locally on the small cells, rather than being pulled from the internet.

“If you imagine a deployment scenario of these hotspots under a single macro cell, what you have is a cloud of computing resources, which are bringing data and applications much closer to the point of use for mobile data users,” said Day.

“On this computing platform you could for example cache local data, such as a football stadium with an internet video feed, and rather than being taken from the web it would be cached locally. If you’re doing Twitter upload the cell can take care of all of that as well.

“Any localised data that otherwise would come from the internet onto the handset is transformed when you put a small cell in,” Day added. “It caches things locally so that’s it’s much closer to the user, and the distance from the small cell to the user’s handsets is also very, very small and the actual data rates are much, much higher – so the actual performance, per user, is much higher.”

Will Franks, CTO of Ubiquisys added, “What we’ve done here is to put significant compute power at the [network] edge – it’s not been done before.”

Ubiquisys said the Intel powered small cells would appear on the market in 2012.

According to a recent Informa Telecoms & Media survey, 61 per cent of responders said that they believed that small cells would be more important than macro cells for effective deployment of LTE networks.

The fourth annual LTE North America Conference takes place in Texas, US, November 8-9