“Small Cells play a very important role for 4G LTE Rollout”

By Zia Askari | TelecomDrive.com

As Bharti Airtel, one of the largest telecom operators in the world is launching its 4G LTE network across the Delhi NCR region, deployment of Small Cells can play a crucial role in terms of delivering the right 4G experience to the end consumer.

“We definitely have plans on 4G Small Cells – especially on those areas where, we have very high congestion. We have recently bagged this Gurgaon Municipal Corporation tender. We have put our 4G Small Cells across four areas in Gurgaon,” informed, Kartik Sheth, CEO – data & devices, Consumer Business, Airtel on the sidelines of Airtel’s 4G trials launch in Delhi – NCR region.

The Importance of Small Cells

Small Cell is a solution to help telecom operators and CSPs, optimize their network resources in a better way and face the rapidly growing demand for coverage and capacity coming from various pockets inside their network.

Small Cells are ideally used to reduce distance between the user and the base station, helping operators improve the signal quality and allow a higher data rate in both up and down links for the consumers.

“Small cells play very important role in 4G LTE because in voice, there are consumers who use X amount of voice, there will be some consumers who will use 2X amount of voice – but in the 4G LTE data scenario, there will be consumers who will use 10 times or 20 times of data. So there are huge data driven spikes in the network. So no matter how you plan the network – there will be spots where data consumption will be spiky. Therefore for such kind of locations, small cells become extremely important. So for hot spots of data, small cells are very important. And similarly small cells become important for areas where there is a coverage gap,” explains, Kartik Sheth, CEO – data & devices, Consumer Business, Airtel.

As more and more telecom networks are getting optimized to handle better data down-linking and up-linking capabilities, small cells seem to have a bright future because they are surely considered as one of the most cost-effective solution to add capacity to the existing network infrastructure.