The Small Cell Forum has established a special interest group (SIG) to drive consensus and create best practice for building and maintaining scalable small cells networks.
The Deployment SIG will be specifically focused on four areas:
- Regulatory – relating to site acquisition, zoning, local legislation, city council rules and public liaisons.
- Business models – considering areas such as neutral/wholesale hosting, leased capacity and shared networks.
- Build – looking at RF & backhaul planning, installation, integration, power, physical, size/loading, safety and security.
- Operational – including maintenance, accessibility, SON impact, service level agreements, key performance indicators and capacity provisioning.
"As small cell deployments of all flavours continue to gain momentum around the globe there is a huge value to be had from sharing operator experiences of deploying and maintaining these networks with the wider ecosystem," Graham Wright, CEO of the Small Cell Forum. "The creation of this group provides a single point of focus to work closely with operators to share best practice and reduce deployment challenge."
The Small Cell Forum is also looking at ways to accelerate enterprise small cell deployments.
The combination of enterprise small cells and network-based management applications allow operators to add significant value and features, such as dedicated voice capacity, mobile unified communications, mobile call recording, local switching of voice traffic and context aware services, as well as the fast-developing field of network analytics.
