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SMALL CELLS SHOW GREAT POTENTIALIN URBAN HOTSPOTS

The Small Cell Forum used the International CTIA WIRELESS 2012 show in New Orleans to unveil its latest whitepaper outlining the opportunities and challenges facing public access 3G small cell deployments. The paper highlights the impact that the technology could have in urban hotspots using conservative small cell models. hotspots where small cells could quickly be carrying more users and data capacity than the local macro network.

DEPLOYMENT CHALLENGES TO CONSIDER BEFORE MIGRATING


However, the report also warns that a number of deployment considerations need to be taken into account before adopting small cell solutions. These include: Choosing between open access or hybrid small cells solutions: The forum points out that by choosing hybrid access operators will be able to provide a gold-class service to certain subscribers or to organisations, such as police or rst responders, who may help to cover the cost of deployment by providing small cell sites and potentially backhaul as well. Choosing how to deploy: Operators must weigh up whether or not to enforce self?deploy or allow organisations to deploy open access small cells themselves without assistance. The report concludes that Self Organising Network technology will be required in both cases as networks will need to be permanently aware of their surroundings.

PUBLIC ACCESS SMALL CELLS CAN OFFLOAD MORE SUBSCRIBERS


It claims that these cells could ofoad the majority of subscribers in many areas, thereby drastically reducing network load and improving the user experience. According to the body, just one public access small cell per macrocell can equate to 21% of users being ofoaded; this rises to 56% with four small cells and 75% with 10 small cells. Simon Saunders, chairman of the Small Cell Forum, explains: The next major stage in small cell deployments is going to be in public spaces. The entire operator community now appreciates that small cells are the key to long term mobile network capacity increases, as well as providing a means of economically delivering coverage in rural blackspots. Their impact will be especially dramatic in dense urban

Addressing the full variety of interference challenges: Operators need to be aware of and overcome these potential issues, including downlink and uplink interference or potential impacts from mobile connections in fast-moving vehicles. Possible mitigation measures include inter-frequency and intra-frequency handover, active hand-in and re-calibrating transmit power and scheduling. Backhaul options for public access small cells should also be considered: These vary in terms of availability, suitability, cost and latency. Unfortunately, in rural areas there tends to be the fewest backhaul options; however DSL and satellite have already been successfully employed. Meanwhile, the Forum also used the show to announce the availability of its FemtoZonal Awareness API within the GSMAs wider OneAPI programme. This means that mobile developers globally can build small cell enabled applications using the GSMAs OneAPI. These can then be tested using the Forums emulator, also unveiled at the show, which simulates a small cell environment.

The list of potential new applications is limitless. These range from simple home reminders when you walk through the door to enhanced enterprise follow-me call services and clever personalized e-commerce shopping mall apps, said Andy Germano, Chairman of the Small Cell Forums Services Working Group. The key right now is to lower the barrier to entry for developers. They need to know that they can target apps at a global market and simply build and test them without any small cell kit or knowledge of radio networks this announcement gives them those guarantees. According to its whitepaper, public uptake of these small cell applications will need to address three key challenges: 1. To encourage broad uptake of public small cell apps, the small cells will need to support subscribers from other mobile networks. 2. To retain high levels of user loyalty and satisfaction it will need to support opt-in functionality. 3. Operators need to consider alternative billing arrangements such as support for gold subscribers, or to allow shops hosting applications to take on the data costs rather than the consumer

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