Global carrier WiFi to reach $4.9B by 2027

Global small cell will reach $6.3 billion by 2027, driven by outdoor densification and indoor penetration solutions, according to Research and Markets.

Global carrier WiFi will reach $4.9 billion by 2027 with Asia Pac leading followed by North America and Europe, driven in part by WiFi6 upgrades.

Increasing demand for enhanced mobile broadband capacity and coverage will continue to play a substantial role in carrier WiFi and small cell market’s growth.

5G will bring about fundamental structural economic changes, such as significantly lower broadband pricing as a whole, and also much greater flexibility for enterprise, industrial, and government market segments in terms of how they connect public to private networks.

A Heterogeneous Network (HetNet) that is based on a combination of cellular small cells, macro cells and carrier Wi-Fi is expected to play a pivotal role in addressing the capacity needs for such a traffic surge in the mobile networks. HetNets are important drivers for the evolution of LTE and critical for 5G networks, which rely upon a greater number of shorter-range radio units for continuous communications.

Physics dictates that higher frequencies need more power and/or more coverage as an RF signal fades more than a lower frequency signal. This is why there will need to be at least an order of magnitude more antennas than required for LTE. Putting this into perspective, the United States will go from roughly 40,000 antennas to 500,000 or more nationally.

5G antennas will be found virtually everywhere in metropolitan areas, but it will not be enough. While dramatically increased coverage will surely support many early 5G applications, such as fixed wireless (ISP alternative, back-haul, and front haul), it will not be enough to support continuous 5G mobility coverage. This will be vitally important for certain applications such as self-driving cars and connected vehicle services.

In terms of deploying radio access network infrastructure, carriers seek to leverage cloud RAN topologies that include centralization of baseband processing units (BBU) that may serve multiple remote radio heads. This facilitates the control of BBU for many different sites on a remote basis. This type of 5G densification strategy optimizes resource utilization and provides various operational improvements such as the ability to upgrade BBUs for different sites without the need to dispatch personnel to each site.

Driven by the growing surge for mobile broadband, carriers worldwide are investing in WiFi and small cells as part of HetNet infrastructure to expand network capacity and coverage. Not only do WiFi and small cell deployments minimize network planning, redesign and real estate costs, they also allow carriers to avoid or minimize new frequency allocation costs. In many cases, small cells can utilize the same frequency spectrum that carriers have allocated for macro cell deployment, while WiFi access points leverage unlicensed spectrum.

CT Bureau