The Small Cell Forum says that public access small cells could play a key role in providing additional mobile coverage, capacity and new services in both urban and rural areas. The Forum’s research report found that even with conservative public deployments, small cells could offload the majority of subscribers in many areas thereby drastically reducing network load and improving the user experience. It found that with a ratio of one public access small cell per macrocell, 21% of users would be offloaded; this rises to 56% with four small cells and 75% with 10 small cells.

The research highlights the major impact the technology could have in urban hotspots with conservative models indicating they could offload the majority of mobile user traffic from the local macro network. However, the report also points out important deployment considerations including challenges such as backhaul and interference and how these can be mitigated.

A major operator deployment consideration is whether to roll out open access small cells that would allow all subscribers equal access or hybrid that prioritises some users. By choosing hybrid access operators will be able to provide a “gold-class” service to certain subscribers or to organisations, such as police or first responders, who may help to cover the cost of deployment by providing small cell sites and potentially backhaul as well. Another important operator decision will be whether to self deploy or allow organisations (e.g. systems integrators, tenant owners, train stations or shopping malls or local IT staff) to deploy these open access small cells themselves without mobile operator personnel. 

This report concludes that SON (Self Organising Network) technology will be required in both cases as networks will need to be permanently aware of their surroundings – it also notes many of these capabilities are included in the 3GPP release 10 standard. 

The public access small cell market is set to undergo dramatic growth with Informa predicting installed units to rise from 595K in 2012 to 2.9 million in 2016 – a 480% (or 5x) increase. According to ABI Research, the public access market is likely to represent 64% of small cell market revenues despite comprising only 6% of shipments by 2016.