Earlier this month, market research firm Infonetics Research (News - Alert) released its small cell report entitled “Small Cell Mobile Backhaul Equipment.” This report tracks and forecasts outdoor small cell backhaul equipment revenue, units and connections. It also tracks small cell sites by medium, such as copper, fiber and air.

Small cells are low-powered radio access nodes that operate in licensed and unlicensed spectrum. They have a range of a little over 30 feet to about one and a quarter miles. This is compared to a mobile macrocell which might have a range of over 10 miles.

Michael Howard (News - Alert), who is principal analyst for carrier networks and co-founder of Infonetics Research recently, also wrote a report forecasting the macrocell backhaul market. For outdoor small cells he wrote “Outdoor small cells or, more accurately, low-power cells, are an exciting new expansion of mobile networking, but they come with challenging backhaul issues. As a result, deployments of outdoor small cells are modest right now, as mobile operators sort things out and test, trial and select technologies, products and vendors. But that’s about to change, and fast.”

Some of the highlights listed by Infonetics in the small cell backhaul market report show that:

• The two main applications for outdoor small cell backhaul are adding capacity/extending coverage in high-traffic urban areas and adding coverage in rural areas
• The nascent outdoor small cell mobile backhaul equipment revenue totaled $39 million worldwide in 2012
• Infonetics projects that outdoor small cell backhaul connections will grow from fewer than 7,000 in 2012 to more than 850,000 in 2017
• Of the small cell backhaul technologies, unlicensed millimeter wave makes up the largest portion of revenue
• North America currently leads the outdoor charge, with AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Clearwire (News - Alert) and Comcast investigating, planning and conducting field trial deployments
• In its related Macrocell Mobile Backhaul Equipment and Services report, Infonetics predicts that a cumulative $44 billion will be spent on macrocell mobile backhaul equipment between 2013 and 2017

Richard Webb, directing analyst for microwave and carrier Wi-Fi at Infonetics, who also co-authored this report adds, “We look for outdoor small cells to really kick into high gear beginning in 2014, and predict a cumulative $6 billion will be spent globally on outdoor small cell backhaul equipment between 2013 and 2017.” You can see this in the following chart;

Sprint (News - Alert) was mentioned in the highlights above. It recently announced that its new tri-band LTE network called Spark will be available very soon. According to Sprint, one of the methods that it will use to expand coverage is to use small cells.