The general consensus has been that Small Cells were used either to solve poor coverage issues (especially indoor) – so called not-spots – or to add capacity. A third reason is becoming visible today – improving Quality of Service and customer satisfaction. CTOs from European operators explained their logic at recent public conferences.

After three years of very healthy performance, the large scale RAN market is beginning to decline. Stefan Pongratz of Dell’Oro Group forecasts an eight percent reduction during 2016 alone. He thinks that Small Cell revenues, already over $1 Billion annually, won’t grow quickly enough to fill that gap. I asked him how this could affect the shape and size of the vendor community looking forward.

There seems to have been an increasing trend of new Forums and branding around the Small Cell industry of late. We’ve drawn up an initial list below and made some observations about which ones you might take seriously and ask if existing organisations are meeting their members’ (and industry) needs.

It takes many months for the Small Cell Forum to complete a work program. So the contents of this week's Release 6 entitled Smart Enterprise published during Mobile World Congress would have been determined quite some time ago. In a fast changing industry, I'd say they've selected the right topics and maintained their focus on the major issues of the industry today. Their key theme is Enterprise including Neutral Host and LTE-U/LAA. I spoke to Alan Law, their Chairman, to find out how their extensive guidance on best practice is being adopted.

While we take some time to digest the firehose of announcements around Mobile World Congress, I thought it would be useful to review some key statistics about the current state, shape and size of the global mobile network industry.

Intense speculation around Sprint’s small cell network strategy has included it being termed Network Suicide. Meanwhile, Sprint shares were up almost 20% on the day of their latest earnings report. So does adopting an urban small cell strategy make for good business or signal a downturn? Sprint's large spectrum holdings and lack of fibre/wireline assets are causing a switch to NLoS Wireless backhaul, which affects their choice of RAN architecture to use traditional Small Cell rather than Cloud RAN.

There’s been quite a surprising result from T-Mobile USA’s unusual tactic to offer free, unlimited video streaming to its customers. Traffic levels are said to have reduced in some cases, very much counter to intuitive expectations. We ask why, investigate what’s happening and consider some of the wider implications.

One announcement you may have missed late last year was a statement by Verizon Wireless CFO, Fran Shammo, in response to suggestions that Verizon would run out of capacity due to lack of spectrum. We reported this in our newsletter but wanted to highlight it further. It’s important because it crystallises the medium term investment strategy that we can expect to see worldwide – moving away from just buying more spectrum to using it more efficiently.

As we approach the holiday season, it’s once again time for me (and other analysts) to reflect back on the year gone by, revisit our predictions and make some new ones for the year ahead.

The introduction of LTE has been a profitable time for the cellular infrastructure industry. A large part of that is down to large new swathes of spectrum being made available rather than purely higher spectral efficiency or faster headline data rates. Some operators almost seem to have suffered from indigestion as they equip their networks to take full advantage. Once the quick returns from low hanging fruit have been gained, it will be the smarter decisions that determine longer-term competitive advantage.

The telecom industry seems to be going through a period of consolidation, with substantial mergers and acquisitions activity seen in many continents. We consider how the deployment of Small Cells and other RAN technologies affect such moves, and look at whether a small cell deployment would be an advantage or not in such cases.

It's that time of year again, when we (and many other analysts) reflect back at the year gone by and look ahead at what developments await us next year.
First, let's put ourselves in the spotlight and revisit our predictions from December 2013, see if we got them right, and look at how the Small Cell industry might evolve next year.

How should mobile operators translate the growth in mobile data to increased revenue and profitability? Some are clearly doing much better than others. Many are simply holding on while a few are major winners or losers.

Industry analysts STL partners released some interesting insights about how mobile operators commercial differentiation. I'd not seen this format before, which emphasises just how far apart some are. Separate charts are shown for US and European markets. They've published a shorter article as a teaser to their full report. The results illustrate how much dramatic market impact one European disruptor can have.

In the long term, the industry generally seems to be agreed that Small Cells are the way to go – almost every operator has these on their roadmap – but they've not taken off in volume yet. Operators continue to shout loudly for more spectrum to be made available, but this isn't always the easy option to deploy quickly and effectively that it might seem.

There's been a lot of media hype around the term 5G in the past year. Is this groundless  and just another excuse for more conference events, or is there some substance to it? I attended Cambridge Wireless Future of Wireless event to try and find out.

Alcatel-Lucent are often associated with urban small cells, where they have become synonymous with the term Metrocell. But they are one of the few end-to-end suppliers that address the whole small cell spectrum including residential and enterprise sectors. We looked into some of their recent changes and future direction.

Like many people in the northern hemisphere, part of my summer break was spent at a small regional airport. I watched the arrival and departure of a low cost airline flight and tracked impact on the cellular network during the turnaround. It's a case which is crying out for a simple and cost effective technical solution, and one which a small cell would be ideally qualified to resolve. We discuss some of the practical aspects which might be holding back wider deployment.

In-building cellular service quality appears to have been noticeably degrading over the last year. This is apparent from an increase in dropped calls, generally poor voice connections (especially uplink), intermittent indoor data connectivity, with text messages - even incoming calls - not getting through.

As the Small Cell industry prepares for the industry's annual get together in London at Small Cell World Summit, it seems that the scope and complexity of what the term "Small Cell" means is being wrenched and stretched almost beyond recognition.

We consider if this is this a good or a bad thing, and what the industry could do about it?

Few new macrocell towers are being built these days. In some countries it's quite the opposite, with site sharing agreements driving consolidation and decommissioning of duplicate adjacent sites. Some are being added to satisfy pockets of poor coverage, especially in rural areas. There are a few regions of the world where further macrocell rollout continues makes good business sense. A further complication is regulatory restrictions on total cellsite RF emission levels, which in at least one country renders the majority of cellsites unsuitable for 4G rollout.