Small Cell Forum, 5G Americas Partner to Drive Best Practices for Small Cell Deployment

Small Cell Forum (SCF) and 5G Americas have launched two detailed guides to support the efficient deployment of small cells.

The two leading mobile wireless organizations have cooperated to produce the reports, titled Small Cell Siting: Regulatory and Deployment Considerations and Multi-Operator and Neutral Host Small Cells: Drivers, Architectures, Planning and Regulation.

The documents mark the first output of SCF and 5G America’s liaison agreement, created explicitly to support and simplify the planning and regulatory issues associated with the dense Heterogeneous Network (HetNet) deployments that will be typical in our 5G mobile future, and in which small cells will be a significant component.

Experts from both forums and their member organizations have been working globally to author the documents. It is the goal of the organizations to help eliminate potential roadblocks and mitigate challenges that may slow the process of successful small cell deployments. The deployment of millions of additional small cell sites in itself will be a monumental challenge in light of current regulation policy and the costs often associated with the traditional cell siting infrastructure.

Small Cell shipments will more than double from about 4 million in 2016 to nearly 10 million in 2020 for enterprise, SoHo, rural, residential and urban deployments according to a 2016 forecast by analyst firm Mobile Experts.

Going forward, SCF and 5G Americas will continue to collaborate to produce and support more initiatives to make it easier for operators to provide consumers and businesses with the service they demand, and realize the commercial and societal benefits of improved connectivity.

“SCF and 5G Americas and their memberships have unparalleled expertise and experience in deploying the dense HetNets that will be at the heart of 5G,” said David Orloff, Chair of Small Cell Forum. “These practical guides offer the wider industry access to advice and best practice based on the lessons from real-world deployments. Our aim is to remove the technical barriers to small cell deployment and encourage a consistent and supportive regulatory environment worldwide.”

The Small cell siting guide focuses on expediting the delivery of dense HetNets, outlining ways in which the many stakeholders involved can cooperate to fulfil the maximum potential of small cells. It also aims to raise awareness among the stakeholders, including equipment producers, operators, integrators, policy makers, and local administrations that are involved in the approval, acceptance and roll out of the small cells layers of the mobile networks.

In the Multi-operator and neutral host small cells white paper, the immediate value of small cells to both the enterprise and operators and the powerful market drivers for small cells to be deployed in multi-operator or neutral host environments, especially in the context of enterprise deployments, are both outlined. The paper seeks to address some of the most common deployment barriers, outlining existing solutions and pointing to emerging ones; as well as highlighting lessons that can be learned from Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS) and Wi-Fi.

”5G Americas has been working for the past three years on a variety of initiatives aimed at the successful development and future deployment of 5G technology, and at this time it is particularly important for collaboration among global organizations,” said Chris Pearson, President of 5G Americas. “Our partnership with SCF allows two of the industry’s leading trade organizations to share their collective resources and speak with one voice to the importance of dense HetNets to facilitate and support not just next generation networks, but better and more cost-effective connectivity today.”