Small Cell Backhaul: Industry Trends and Market Overview - Slidedeck

Very good overview of Small Cells backhaul by Monica Paolini, Lance Hiley and Frank Rayal

Enterprise Small Cell Architectures

Deployment in enterprise is a challenging task for the operators but it has many benefits hence this is one of the areas they have been working very hard to get it right.

China Mobile's Nanocell

China Mobile prefers to call its Small Cell, Nanocell. I found an interesting summary on this topic from Rupert Baines in the OSP Magazine, some of this information is copied below.

Nanocell is defined by the China Mobile Research Institute (CMRI) as follows: “An integrated Small cell supporting GSM / TD-SCDMA / TD-LTE standards and WLAN (WiFi) solutions. With the key feature of supporting both wireless network and WLAN (WiFi) services, it can be deployed in enterprise, home and high capacity hotspot locations. It also uses standard broadband connection as a low-cost network backhaul, hence reducing deployment and maintenance cost while providing advanced and reliable security features.”

WiFi & Cellular: True Love or Arranged Marriage?

An interesting video of the presentation by Nick Johnson from IP Access which he gave in the LTE World Summit 2013

SK Telecom: Commercial deployment of LTE Femto cell

SK Telecom does not fail to impress with their aggressive roll-outs and impressive solutions to challenging problems. One such presentation from the Small Cells World Summit 2013 in London is embedded as follows:

Satellite Backhaul for Rural Small Cells

 A typical problem with the rural small cells is how to power and backhaul them. Power issue can be solved using Solar cells, wind turbines, etc. and generally a combination of them as a failsafe mechanism but what about the backhaul.

Site Selection - Nice animation by Alcatel-Lucent

See Also:

• The biggest challenge to Small Cells deployment

Interference in 3G Hetnets in case of shared carrier

We had a discussion earlier on 'dedicated v/s shared' carrier here. This post is just re-iterating the fact that while in case of LTE, there are advanced techniques like eICIC to manage interference (see 3G4G blog here), in case of 3G there are no standard techniques to manage the interference in case of shared carrier.

A recent presentation from ZTE in one of the conferences explains this point further that has been reproduced below for reference:

Small Cells in LTE - 3GPP Rel-8 to Rel-12

A simple picture showing the Small Cells support in different 3GPP releases. For more details refer to the 3G4G blog here.

AT&T Experience: Small Cells in the office

From a presentation by Gordon Mansfield, in the Small Cells World Summit 2013.

What do the customers think?

“The Metrocell is working very well, we’ve seen significant improvements with data connection and speed which was our biggest issue before installation. Voice also seems to be working well.”

“The individuals within the office have seen a stronger signal and are able to make and receive calls in areas that they couldn’t before.”

“The new system seems to be working – my primary benchmark is whether or not I experience dropped calls …. I am not. In the past I received a voice mail notice but the phone never rang to give me an opportunity to answer it now all calls are coming through.”