The term Enterprise addresses any non-residential in-building including hotels, convention centres, transport hubs, offices, hospitals and retail outlets. It's not just intended for businesses to serve their own office staff.
This can be a more lucrative opportuntiy for small cell vendors than residential, because price points are higher. Equipment is sized larger, both RF power for wider coverage and increased processing for higher capacity. Third party systems integrators are often involved with the installation. Being indoor, products don't have to be mechanically as robust or weatherproof, and are often connected by a single Ethernet cable providing both power and backhaul.
Enterprise Small Cells make it economically viable
Smaller businesses and home workers have not been able to justify additional cellular equipment investments up to now - the additional call traffic they generate would not qualify for additional cellsites to be installed. This traffic is aggregated up with all other traffic in their area and cellsites are planned and installed based on total capacity and coverage demands. Enterprise small cells offer the opportunity to address these enterprise markets through low cost, self installed units which capitalise on the existing broadband connections available to most businesses.
Addressing the different size and scale of businesses
When looking at the enterprise market, the size of each segment grows tenfold. For example, in the UK, there are approximately:
This excludes those working from home for large enterprises.
SOHOs and SMEs would be the initial market entry. They tend to adopt new technology more quickly, and the low cost price puts this in reach of everyone. Their product, shown on the right hand side, is typical of the format available.
Larger business premises may benefit from a local controller which directly manages the cluster of enterprise femtocells, dealing with the local handoff and consolidating the signalling traffic. Spidercloud Wireless have developed a solution specifically targetted at this market, which is described in this interview with Ronny Haraldsvik, their CMO.
Often businesses have a mix of different sizes of building, ranging from remote workers operating independently through to large scale office blocks housing thousands of staff. Businesses seek to offer the same range of facilities to all their staff, regardless of location and this requires a mix of different products.If additional business services are combined with the enterprise femtocell offer, such as IT services for data backup, email to mobile etc. this could provide a package with additional benefits that is cheaper to deliver and has upside of additional revenue opportunities.
Outsourcing and other commercial models appearing
Some innovative network operators have specifically targetted the enterprise sector using small cells. Network Norway deployed femtocells for their enterprise customers both in the office and at their homes, capturing anything up to 80% of their mobile traffic. The remainder is handled either through their own macrocell network or via national roaming with the encumbent Telenor. This approach makes it quite cost effective to provide excellent coverage closely targetted at paying customers, while still offering good outdoor service. In principle, there is no reason why an MVNO may not also operate this way, providing it obtained the permission of its host network operator. Several MVNOs are believed to be trialling or offering this solution.
Outsourcing enterprise femtocell deployment is another option for network operators. A number of organisations and consortia are proposing and/or trialling solutions, including Cloudberry Norway (interview), NEC/COLT and NEC/Virgin (NEC interview).
Automation is a growing theme for many aspects of life today. Many of the manual and even highly skilled processes of the past are being superseded by alternative, innovative methods. Recently, I visited CommScope’s R&D lab at Chelmsford, near Boston, and saw for myself how they’ve pioneered using an autonomous robot to walk their building and conduct extensive wireless performance testing.
Many in-building wireless systems have been installed with the primary focus on ubiquitous coverage. Benoit Fleury, VP Product Line Management at iBwave, believes the time has come for capacity planning to take a more prominent role.
He explains why in-building design needs to take a comprehensive view of capacity provided across 3G, LTE and Wi-Fi technologies, termed HetNet Capacity Planning, and how that can be achieved today.
Enterprise Small Cells are making a huge difference to many businesses and venues where they’ve been installed. Here we take a look at a factory site in New Jersey that had no cellular service. After trying several potential solutions, SpiderCloud’s LTE Enterprise RAN solved the problem. We spoke to their IT Manager, Bob Howe, to learn about his experience and the difference it made.
Graham Payne, CEO of Opencell, reports success with their business proposition installing multi-operator small cells at Enterprises across the UK. Although not yet fully neutral host, he reports strong demand, viable price point and success. We asked him what the ingredients for success are, and how the industry could evolve to improve matters further.
Amit Jain, VP Product Management and Marketing for Spidercloud, shared his current views on Enterprise Small Cells in a recent webinar. Here, we summarise the key architecture choices they’ve taken and explain the reasoning behind them when addressing this rapidly evolving marketplace. This includes where an Enterprise Controller is needed, why 3G/LTE remains important and what’s required to support MulteFire and LAA.
A significant number of users continue to report poor mobile coverage in their homes. There will always be areas which are uneconomic for mobile operator to reach. They range from rural areas
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The term Enterprise addresses any non-residential in-building including hotels, convention centres, transport hubs, offices, hospitals and retail outlets. It's not just intended for businesses to
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Urban small cells (sometimes also named metrocells) are compact and discrete mobile phone basestations, unobstrusively located in urban areas. They can be mounted on lampposts, positioned on the
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A rural small cell is a low power mobile phone base station designed to bring mobile phone service to small pockets of population in remote rural areas. These could be hamlets, small villages or
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