Small cells star in LTE market

The LTE equipment market is set for some impressive growth in the next few years, according to a report from market research firm Dell ‘Oro Group. The new report states that as a whole the LTE equipment market will enjoy a compound annual growth rate of 81 per cent over the next five years, hitting $8bn by 2015. Revenue from small cells will be a major contributor to that, the report states, representing 9 per cent of the total LTE enode B revenue, as operators begin to actively employ picocell technology.

“In the past year, we have seen that operators have shifted from thinking and talking about small cells, to conducting actual trials on picocells,” said Stefan Pongratz, analyst at Dell’Oro Group. “More operators are now focused on investigating and trialling best solutions and approaches to complement their macro networks so they could increase capacity and performance in high-utilization areas. While we believe the macro LTE network will carry the majority of the traffic through 2015, we believe vendors will start recognising significant pico eNode B revenues in the outer years of the forecast period,” added Pongratz.

Recently Telecoms.com interviewed Dr Shahram Niri, NEC’s director of global LTE strategy & solutions who was insistent that small cell technology would be vital in order to enable operators to deal with the widely forecast data boom. “At NEC we believe that small cells are a whole new way of building future mobile broadband networks,” Niri said. “They add massive capacity, in a very fast time, with a TCO which is absolutely a key to sustainability of mobile broadband business.”

The sixth annual LTE Asia conference, takes place in Suntec, Singapore, on the 5-7th September 2011.

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