I recently
attended a webinar that discussed issues related to in-building cell phone
service. The presenter
projected that the growth of cellular based broadband data usage will be
tremendous over the next four to five years. Most of this usage
will occur in the indoor environment. He went to discuss
the tools that the service providers have to support and manage this growth. These included outdoor
macrocells, femtocells, picocells, metrocells, microcells, WiFi and DAS.
With respect to
the outdoor macrocell sites, there was mention of how expensive and timing
consuming they were to deploy. Moreover, in dense
urban areas, outdoor sites were not likely to have enough capacity to meet all
the customer’s needs.
A major weakness
with femtocell and WiFi, is that neither support LTE nor do they hand off to
the outdoor network. Moreover, with respect to WiFi, there are concerns about Quality of Service as
well as the service providers' ability to manage them properly. Regarding Small Cells, some of the issues that will need to be resolved are who
will pay for the CapEx to install them, how backhaul will be provided, and how
can they can be managed in connection with the broader network.
There were a lot
interesting concepts discussed. As with all other
things cellular, it all about understanding your situation, being connected with
the service providers as well as the ability to execute your plans in a timely manner.
