If you aren’t actively involved in the technology industry and heard the term “small cells” thrown around, you have perhaps conjured up images of different types of blood cells within the human body. Yet, you are unfortunately dead wrong and actually, small cells are helping mobile operators worldwide to overcome major obstacles related to network capacity, data off-load requirements and in-build coverage challenges.

As the weeks pass the space continues to expand, and just today, it was revealed that small cells boasting Wi-Fi capabilities have the potential to completely change the game for cell phone service providers in particular. This is primarily due to the fact that they can dramatically reduce the amount of congestion caused by tons of data being sent various places simultaneously in addition to seamlessly integrating countless devices within only one infrastructure.

“By combining the different elements of just such an architecture, wireless carriers can use small cells to deploy optimized solutions tailored to the coverage and capacity requirements of networks and their different locations,” said Jagdish Rebello, Ph.D., director for Consumer & Communications at HIS, in a statement. “For entrepreneurs, intellectual-property firms and wireless providers, the offloading approach also affords them an opportunity to develop a unique ‘network of networks,’ which can deliver seamless handoffs as users move from cellular to high-bandwidth personal networks like Wi-Fi.”

Small cells are sometimes referred to as metro cells and when implemented in either urban areas or popular places the masses frequent, including malls, railway and subway stations, and can enhance coverage significantly. Further, when operators leverage small cells, they can dramatically ramp up customer satisfaction as well as reduce subscriber churn.

Moreover, as the use of small cells base stations become increasingly popular since they can optimize wireless spectrum resources between the macro or micro network and the small cells, Wi-Fi connected systems worldwide are also growing .

“Wi-Fi is becoming ubiquitous and spurring new opportunities, including the capability for wireless service providers to offload chronically clogged 3G and 4G cellular networks into heterogeneous architectures,” added Steve Mather, senior principal analyst and subject matter expert for wireless at IHS (News - Alert). “Such architectures will involve a combination of macro and micro base stations, coupled with low-powered small cells and enterprise femto cells. This approach overall will reshape the connected world by linking billions of devices with free, high-speed links.”

While IHS is now predicting that the large-scale deployment of small cells will officially kick off in 2014, the shipments of Wi-Fi chipsets are slated to expand to nearly 2.14 billion units, up 20 percent from 1.78 billion last year. And by 2017, analysts forecast that Wi-Fi chipset shipments will total approximately 3.71 billion units, shown in the figure below.

As the utilization of these next-generation products grows, consumers will  demand they that work successfully in tandem.

Tom Keating, VP & CTO of TMC (News - Alert) concluded, “With the explosion of wireless and increased bandwidth utilization by users, densely populated areas are looking to complement their 4G services with small cells, are a creative and cost-effecting way of leveraging existing infrastructure to multiply capacity as well open the door to small cell applications, such as personalized e-commerce shopping mall apps.” Tom continued, “One of the challenges to encourage broad uptake of public small cell apps is that the small cells will need to support subscribers from other mobile networks.”