The Small Cell Forum, the independent industry and operator association that supports small cell deployment worldwide, today announced early details of Release Two, its plan to accelerate enterprise small cell deployments, to be published in December 2013.
These plans highlight the massive opportunities for operators to add significant value to their deployments through new services, as well as pinpointing the challenges and how they can be overcome.
The combination of enterprise small cells and network-based management applications allow operators to add significant value with exciting new features. These include: dedicated voice capacity, mobile unified communications, mobile call recording, local switching of voice traffic and context aware services, as well as the fast-developing field of network analytics. However there are also several key enterprise challenges that are significantly more complex than those found in residential femtocells. These include inter-cell interactions, larger coverage areas and increased user numbers typically with higher user mobility.
“The enterprise segment represents a huge opportunity for the mobile operator community, both in terms of increasing coverage but also with enterprise IT architects who are seeking to move all personal communications services on to mobile devices and “unwire” their organizations. However, to date the enterprise has largely proven hard to target effectively,” said Gordon Mansfield, Chairman of the Small Cell Forum. “Building on the solid foundation of Release One, our Enterprise Release will provide additional detail tailored to the segment to help operators unlock the considerable potential of this market.”
Enterprise small cells deliver improved coverage and capacity as well as providing a platform for advanced business applications and network analytics, which can be located either on-site or in the mobile network. Traditionally this market segment has been underserved, as options such as Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS) have only been available to larger scale enterprises due to the considerable costs involved.