As our communications processors team gets ready to head to London again for the annual Small Cells World Summit, we’re excited about what we’re going to hear, who we’re going to meet with and whether we get to take home another award for our small cell technology!
This year, the Small Cell Forum received a record number of entries from around the world for their annual Small Cell Industry Awards, “further attesting to the relevance and growing traction of the small cell business case” in their words. We couldn’t agree more, which is why we are incredibly excited to be shortlisted for the best “small cell access point design and technology innovation (vendor)” award alongside two highly regarded companies, Cisco and Spidercloud. Still, we believe our TCI6630K2L small cell SoC gives them a run for their money – but we’ll see next Wednesday when the winners are announced!
As far as what we can expect to hear at the Summit this year, Wi-Fi integration should continue to be a popular topic and discussions around how operators will use it will be at the forefront of the dialogue. Similarly, while indoor small cell enterprise deployments are where a lot of the near term traction will be, the focus of the discussion should shift to how we ensure reliable quality and comprehensive service rather than just add more capacity.
Finally, we can also expect to hear a lot more about backhaul. 
With yottabytes of data traversing our networks each month, industry experts are discussing how this data makes it from the local access point back to the Internet. Clearly it will require careful design, operational planning, capital investment and focused execution to build up the framework needed to support the enormous amounts of connection points out there. Since 70% of the base stations use a wireless link for backhaul to the Internet, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that operators are hyper-focused on finding cost effective solutions to build out the infrastructure. To wit, this year’s Small Cells Summit even features a backhaul track with sessions like,“Implementing today small cell networks with novel backhaul solutions” and, “Assessing advancements in technology to enable efficient backhaul” on the agenda.
Are you planning on attending the Summit this year? If so, we invite you to stop by our meeting room in London to chat with us or catch a live demonstration of our latest technology!