Small Cell Forum Boosts Membership to Accelerate Progress on Path to 5G

Small Cell Forum (SCF) has welcomed nine new members from across the wireless and internet ecosystems, further expanding its breadth of expertise – especially in key Asian markets – and strengthening its efforts in laying the groundwork for robust and interoperable 5G networks.

The Forum’s new members are: Ciena, Druid, Fastback Networks, InCoax, NextNav, Plasma Antennas, Raycap, Shenzen Gongjin Electronics Co and Technicolor.

As networks continue to densify and evolve, Small Cell Forum is becoming an increasingly vital hub for industry activity around densification and 5G. It is gathering many inputs from a wide range of members and partner organizations, and is starting to coordinate these to create a unified output which will underpin future platforms.

These inputs come from Operators, the Forum’s Membership, Enterprise Customers, and Industry Partnerships. The industry will continue to look toward the Small Cell Forum for guidelines, models, processes, and technology understanding to ensure a successful evolution toward hyperdense networks and 5G.

Small Cell Forum also announced its newly elected board, which will continue to be chaired by AT&T’s David Orloff. The new board comprises:

Piyush Raj, American Tower
Prabhakar Chitrapu, AT&T
Luigi Tarlazzi, CommScope
Mark Reudink, Crown Castle
Martin Ljungberg, Ericsson
Tormod Larsen, ExteNet Systems
Nansen Ding, Huawei
Mike Cronin, Node-H
Randy Cox, Nokia
Caleb Banke, Qualcomm Technologies Inc.
Tareq Amin, Reliance Jio
Aya Mukaikubo, SoftBank Corp
Art King, SpiderCloud Wireless

Existing members include BT, Cable & Wireless, China Telecom, Ericsson, Huawei, iBwave, Intel, KT Corporation, Nokia, Orange and Telefónica. Collectively, SCF operator members serve more than 2 billion subscribers and operate more than 15 million hotspots globally.

These announcements follow SCF’s first Partner Day event which was recently held in Atlanta, Georgia. This brought together many of the Forum’s partner organizations alongside whom they have launched work programs that can continue to realize SCF’s key initiatives – ‘Deploying Hyperdense Networks’ and ‘Enabling Digitized Enterprise’. These two themes continue to tie together all of the Forum’s projects across the HetNet and create a powerful framework for the transition to 5G.

“Small cells are now widely accepted as the key way in which large scale capacity will be delivered across mobile networks. Therefore, it remains critical that the whole telecoms and services ecosystem is ready to support the growing wave of small cell deployments both on today’s LTE networks as well as future evolutions,” said David Orloff, Chair of Small Cell Forum. “I am delighted to welcome our new members, each of whom will bring their own knowledge and insight, helping the Forum as we accelerate towards a 5G future.”

“Small Cell Forum is an influential body and pragmatic decision-making authority that has continually advanced the case for ubiquitous connectivity over the last 10 years,” said Piyush Raj, Director of Technology Innovation for American Tower. “We are looking forward to participating on the board to help deliver innovative solutions and expert guidance to help ensure the best and most efficient possible outcomes for future networks.”

“We are excited to join other industry leaders on SCF’s Board to help continue its rapid and successful progress, both in accelerating deployments today and also plotting a roadmap to future platforms and 5G,” said Bo Piekarski, VP of Product Development at Crown Castle. “Crown Castle is committed to active participation in key standards and leadership bodies, helping to shape and grow the mobile wireless industry.”

“As the largest independent provider of distributed networks (DNS), ExteNet is uniquely positioned to champion the widespread adoption of small cells and HetNets,” said Tormod Larsen, Chief Technology Officer, ExteNet. “Data capacity continues to grow more critical to address the needs of today’s data-intensive users, and small cells offer highly scalable, flexible and high-capacity solutions for both indoor and outdoor use. The Small Cell Forum (SCF) is an important organization to drive understanding and awareness of the value of this technology. As long-time SCF members, we chose to join the board to bring our expertise of more than decade of experience in building, designing, deploying and managing multi-carrier and multi-use solutions to help advance the organization’s mission.”