ABI Research's latest forecast of the small cells market echoes the industry predictions for the segment for the year 2014, where their deployment was expected to take off on a large scale. ABI Research’s expects the small cells market revenue to reach $1.8 billion this year and lined up AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone, Telefonica, Softbank, SK Telecom, and Sprint as the major service providers driving the deployment of both Outdoor and Metrocell deployments.
ABI Research also forecasts the number of LTE smallcells to grow by 2X in 2014 and by a similar factor each year through 2019 where the value of LTE small cells are expected to make up more than half of a $10 billion equipment market. The Asia-Pacific region, given its large size and 4G deployments in South Korea and Japan and the start of commercial TD-LTE operations in China and India, will grow to represent over 50% of the worldwide small cell equipment market by 2019. ABI cited the growing momentum within the segment with a host of announcements during the recent Mobile World Congress, by key players such as NSN, Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, NEC, ip.access, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Freescale, Broadcom, and Cavium.
“As mobile network operators implement small cell outdoor networks, several success factors emerge as critical for a successful deployment,” says Nick Marshall, principal analyst at ABI Research. “We see multiple solutions for backhaul, power, permitting, and siting employed by the operator community throughout the rest of 2014 and which will increase small cell momentum in 2015.”
