Small Cell Economics - Key to 3G Profitability

Many recent discussions on outdoor small cells have centered on the opportunity for small cells in a 4G/LTE environment. While there is no doubt that small cells need to adopt 4G All-IP ‘LTE-Ready’ architecture, their most immediate value to operators will be in countries where 4G spectrum availability or deployment is still 2 to 3 years away and where high cost 2.5G and 3G infrastructure is in need of immediate capacity upgrade with a small cell HetNet.

1 Executive Summary
2 Small Cell Strategic Issues
2.1 Trends Driving Infrastructure Capacity Solutions.
2.2 Where will New Capacity come from?
2.3 Defining Small Cells
2.4 Why not just Split Macrocells?
2.5 `HetNets' bring significant gains
2.6 Or Offload `unwanted' Traffic to WiFi?
2.7 Backhaul Capacity has a major impact on end-to-end performance.
3 Purposes for Small Cell Deployment
3.1 Which Use Cases are driving Small cell Deployments - a Taxonomy
3.2 Advantages and Disadvantages of Small cells
4 Vendor claims for Cost Savings from Small Cells
4.1 W-CDMA - Alcatel Lucent (ALU)
4.2 Urban Hot Spots - Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN)
4.3 Quality of Service (QoS) and Higher User Throughput as Key Drivers for Small cells
4.4 Focus on 3G Expansion - Alcatel Lucent
5 Are Small Cells actually less Costly?
5.1 Prices of Radio Systems are lower and Core Infrastructure can be shared efficiently but..
5.2 Total Cost of Operations (TCO) indicates that small cells are likely to be more costly.
5.3 Adding 4G-type small cells for 3G networks pays off over the next 3.5 years.
6 Cost Components of Small cells
7 Key Conclusions
7.1 Contact the author of this report: