Critical Mass Is Expected by 2015 for Outdoor Small Cell Backhaul Equipment

Infonetics Research has released a brief synopsis of its Small Cell Mobile Backhaul Equipment report. This is Infonetics’ biannual report that tracks equipment used for transporting traffic from outdoor small cell sites. These are the devices that you would typically see attached to a light pole, utility pole or on the side of a building.

This report is used to track and forecast outdoor cell backhaul equipment revenue, units, connections and small cell sites by medium such as copper, fiber or air. Some of the equipment that is tracked includes DSL modems and DSLAMs, Ethernet over copper, Ethernet over fiber, point-to-point (P2P) microwave, point-to-multi-point (P2MP) microwave, <6GHz microwave and licensed and unlicensed millimeter wave.
 

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Some of the topics taken from Infonetics’ report on outdoor small cell backhaul market are as follows:

• Deployments of outdoor small cells will be driven largely by mobile operators' need to enhance saturated macro-cellular networks in urban, high-traffic areas and improve the mobile broadband experience
• Of the wireless microwave technologies, licensed millimeter wave accounts for the largest portion of outdoor small cell backhaul revenue
• Outdoor small cell backhaul connections are expected to reach 656,000 in 2017
• Though North America originally led the outdoor small cell charge, Infonetics expects regional revenue share to shift to Asia Pacific and EMEA by 2017
• Infonetics expects a cumulative $3.6 billion to be spent worldwide on outdoor small cell backhaul equipment over the 5 years from 2013 to 2017, with the market kicking into high gear in 2015
• This figure is in addition to the over $43 billion being spent on macrocell backhaul equipment during the same 5-year period 

This report takes a look at a four year period ending in 2017 however Infonetics’ report sees that outdoor small cells will see significant growth in just two years. By 2015 this market is expected to reach critical mass. This comes later than was previously expected. It seems that the growth that was expected to be seen by now hasn’t quite been there. Outdoor small cells have been a little slow on the uptake.

Richard Webb, who is the directing analyst for microwave and carrier Wi-Fi at Infonetics had the following to say: “Although Infonetics has never been bullish about the rate of adoption of outdoor small cells, from the relatively modest scale of deployments in 2013 we now expect critical mass in outdoor small cells to be achieved a little later than previously forecast, still some two years out from now. This, of course, directly impacts the small cell backhaul market, which will scale in parallel. We still believe the outdoor small cell market will happen, but judging by the speed at which things moved—or didn’t move—in 2013, it’s just going to take a little longer to get off the runway.”