Look back and forecast of Small Cells

Going through 'End of Year Report' by ThinkSmallCell. A good summary of what happened in 2016 and what we can see in 2017. This picture above from the same report is interesting. As you can see that the average speeds of 3G have decreased while that of 4G has increased significantly. I suspect what has happened is that the newer devices with more advanced 3G capabilities now have access to 4G while the older devices with basic HSDPA support have stayed on 3G, decreasing the average speeds.

You can also read the top 5 posts from this blog here.

Coming back to forecasts, another ThinkSmallCell Analyst Spotlight webinar where Caroline Gabriel from Rethink research and Kyung Mun from Mobile experts provide their insight into where small cells are headed in 2017 and beyond.

Personally, I think with VoWiFi becoming common in our devices, the market for residential and enterprise eventually will decrease. I hear you say what about QoS, well see my 3G4G blog post here.

Here are the slides and video from ThinkSmallCell webinar:

Small Cells' and 5G - Small Cell Forum Workshop

Small Cell Forum recently held a workshop on the role of small cells' in 5G. Each speaker had 10 minutes to present their view/vision. The presentations are available here and combined PDF embedded below.

Small Cell Forum workshop on 5G

I was having a twitter discussion earlier today as to whether 2G/3G should be switched off to make room for the more efficient 4G/4G+. While I agree with regards to the efficiency of 4G/4G+, there is still plenty of room for existing technologies, including 2G for a long time. 

While 5G is great and as can be seen in the picture above, a very optimistic picture has been painted with regards to LTE/5G.

Small cell forum recently held a workshop on 5G in Rome. Though it doesn't say explicitly, I am assuming the focus was Small Cells and 5G. It wouldn't be surprising as most of mmWave deployments would be comparatively small as compared to macrocells today.

“All of 5G looks a lot like a small cell” - Matt Beal, Vodafone Director of Innovation and Architecture at #SCWS2016 https://t.co/RGSC6aSTLF

— Zahid Ghadialy (@zahidtg) August 28, 2016

I like this picture below as it shows that there are practical problems to solve today then worry about the 5G deployments of 2020. Having said that, the mobile community has to start preparing for it now to be ready by early 2020's  

Huawei had another interesting concept of how 5G HetNets will look

Nokia suggested that the lessons learned from Small Cells will help vendors with 5G deployments.

You can see all the presentations available here.

If you found something very interesting, please share in comments.