Data is still one of the biggest parts of the mobile market today, and with good reason. It's being used not only in its conventional means, but also as a means to supplant phone calling thanks to things like voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) and its various descendants. So with data an increasingly prized prospect, the means of providing it are likewise prized. Outdoor small cells are having a great run of things so far, but this market may be getting tighter in short order thanks to competing technologies.
A new report from ABI Research (News - Alert) notes that times are good for outdoor small cells, and probably will be for some time as evidenced by an expected 43 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between now and 2020. This is terrific news by most measures, but reports suggest that deployments of both Wi-Fi and outdoor distributed antenna systems (DAS) are likely to start cannibalizing the small cell market starting in 2017.
This doesn't mean an end to the small cell market—even ABI Research's projections suggest that the market will only be cannibalized “to some extent”, but it's still a point to watch for. ABI Research's networks research director, Nick Marshall, noted that the 2015Mobile World Congress event showed that several different technologies ranging from LTE (News - Alert)-Unlicensed (LTE-U) to LTE Wi-Fi Access (LWA) from a variety of different companies were showing how Wi-Fi needed to be part of the operation in improving network density.
Several challenges in the small cell market including backhaul, supplying power and getting permits, showed how the rise of small cells as a service (SCaaS) was also a point to consider. But rapid gains in the numbers of LTE small cells — expected to double in just 2015 — will help give this market staying power even as new competing technologies join in. Indeed, LTE small cells' value is said to reach 90 percent of the small cell equipment market in 2020. The Asia-Pacific region alone is said to represent better than half of the worldwide small cell equipment market by 2018.
Mobile data consumption is not strictly an American phenomenon, and its consumption seems to be growing worldwide thanks to an increasingly large number of mobile devices coming into play and an increasingly large number of things to do with these devices. Getting continuous, high-density access out over a wide area is a difficult prospect at best, and for a while, small cells looked like a great way to go. With small cell deployments on the rise, it probably should have been foreseen that other technologies would step in as well, looking for a piece of a rapidly growing market, and that's where we seem to be right now.
It's not a huge surprise to see the small cell market squeezed in such fashion, and though it's not to be counted out, it's probably going to have a tougher time than usual down the line. Still, the main purpose here is to get connectivity in hand whether it's through small cell, oDAS, or Wi-Fi.