If you are a follower of the wireless technology, you have probably heard about the Small Cells World Summit being held next week in London. In preparation, I thought I would do a ‘Four’ for Friday instead of the usual five! Here are some topics I think you might expect to be heavily discussed.
It’s in the Enterprise…
The business enterprise that is; office buildings, campus parks, hospitals, and this is where a lot of the near term small cell action will be found.
WHY – Fi
We have seen Wi-Fi as a hot topic at the small cell events before, maybe we will find out more about how and why the operators will employ it.
Real world reality
Will the small cell use cases scheduled to be discussed be sobering or stimulating?
Making more of small cells
Hmmm, what opportunities are there to provide value added features, to monetize installed small cells?
I suspect that the discussions around the later three topics will actually end up with a connection back to the enterprise. As wireless operators have begun their small cell field trials and early deployments, they have faced numerous challenges, accessing power supply and backhaul being two of them. It will be no big surprise to find that many of operators are focused on the indoor enterprise as a near term opportunity to make penetration with small cell deployment. Hospitals, campuses, office parks are heavily populated with data consuming wireless handheld devices, ready for increased capacity. If agreements between the operators and the enterprise IT managers can be reached, leveraging the existing enterprise Ethernet backbone can potentially solve two of the major installation challenges: access to Internet backhaul and access to power. I am anxious to hear how well the summit sessions on solutions answer the challenges of the early deployment use case presentations.
Are you planning on attending? I would love to hear your thoughts, before and after the event!