In an usual approach, ZTE has developed a product that uses existing electricity wiring for Enterprise Small Cell backhaul. We researched how it works, and consider some of the benefits and the limitations.
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Enterprise
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:
- 5,000 large enterprises
- 50,000 small/medium enterprises (SMEs)
- 500,000 small office/home office (SOHOs)
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).
SpiderCloud promotes a diet of Labour Sandwiches
What skillsets are really required for a cost-effective high-quality Enterprise Small Cell deployment. Is it the low cost, simpler Wi-Fi approach or the complex and costly RF engineering used for many DAS deployments? Art King, Director of Enterprise Services & Technologies at SpiderCloud, promotes a complementary mix which he describes as a Labour Sandwich.
CommScope create virtual small cells out of thin air
Traditional thinking is that each cell has its own physical base station, and that adding capacity in a cellular network involves creating more cells by installing more base stations. CommScope (who acquired Airvana in October 2015) have developed a technique called Cell Virtualisation, by which they can grow capacity by reusing the same frequencies within a single cell. We spoke with Vedat Eyuboglu, Small Cells CTO, to understand out how it works.
Sizing the potential for Small Cells as a Service
Analyst iGR published a sponsored survey report last year assessing the potential US market size of Small Cells as a Service for the Enterprise sector. While you may not agree with all of its conclusions, there were some results you might find surprising and several nuggets of interest. We’ve summarised and commented with our view and the implications.
Contrasting and combining Enterprise cellular and Wi-Fi planning
We’ve often heard that Wi-Fi deployment is much simpler and cheaper than cellular systems. We asked the experts at iBwave, whose in-building RF planning and design suite now handles both, what the key differences were and why it might make sense to combine them.
