A new potentially 'disruptive' technology has been unveiled at Mobile World Congress. It is called 'small cell' technology, and it could completely change the nature of cell phone towers. These new 'small cells' are about the size of a Rubik's Cube, as opposed to the ugly towers and fake trees & rocks dotting landscapes currently.
According to our research, the benefits of this new technology are plentiful. The first benefit, of course, is the smaller size which makes it easier to install and virtually eliminates any placement difficulties. Next, these 'small cells' only need a power and a network connection. Thus, they could be placed on top of existing infrastructure, like lamp-posts and utility poles. Also, this technology is cheaper to build than traditional cell-phone towers. Finally, by covering an area with multiple 'small cells' instead of several large cell towers you get three additional immediate benefits to consumers.
The first is that by having a large network of smaller connections you increase the reliability of the network with fewer dead spots. The second is that you are able to increase speeds because less people are saturating individual towers since the workload of the 3G and 4G data connections is spread out over multiple 'nodes'. Third, is an interesting hidden benefit, that we were skeptical of at first. However, after doing some extra digging we were able to more fully understand the way a cell phone tower functions.
Apparently, our cell phones have to effectively 'yell' at the cell phone tower to be 'heard' by it. The more people in an area that are using the same cell phone tower, the more our cell phones have to increase their signal strength in order to be 'heard' by the tower. By having multiple nodes spread over a larger area, less people will be sharing the same node, and ultimately we will actually see improved battery life from our phones.
This new technology has some hurdles to overcome at first. The primary one is that even though the 'small cells' only need power and a network connection, that network connection needs to be a fiber connection to the phone companies network. This is probably not a huge issue in larger cities, but it will be fairly expensive to implement this in some rural areas and small towns where installing fiber connections is prohibitively more expensive.
Another stumbling block to the technology is making the newer technology work with the older technology in a "heterogeneous" network. The main problem is minimizing the radio interference between the two types of cells.
Still, there are several big name players investing heavily in this technology, and they are confident they can overcome these obstacles. The two big name conglomerates that debuted their tech at MWC over the weekend were Alcatel-Lucent, with their "lightRadio Cube" and Texas Instruments-Azcom, with their "KeyStone multicore architecture".
Here is a quote from the TI-Azcom partnership,
Here are a couple quotes from other companies in the cell phone industry who shared their perspective on the technology,
This technology is similar to "femtocell" technology that companies like AT&T and Verizon have been using in homes for a couple of years now. The femtocell tech is a USB device that helps boost your phone signal strength in a couple of rooms in your house. The difference is that the 'small cell' technology can scale to much larger networks and obviously can handle a lot more power. Ultimately, it is conceivable that we will see a convergence of both of these technologies. Who knows, perhaps eventually we will be walking around with our own portable cell phone tower built-in to our phones. Like the old adage says, "The truth is stranger than fiction."
Source: Yahoo! News and TheStreet.com
Editorial by dgstorm
Last edited: