Commercial benefits also shine as market matures
London, May 12, 2016: Independent companies took centre stage in London last night at the Small Cell Forum’s annual awards ceremony. Just three years after its launch, US company Parallel Wireless scooped two awards both for excellence in small cell deployment; while long-standing UK independent company ip.access picked up one company and two individual awards.
The panel of judges for the Awards was chaired by Caroline Gabriel, a founder and senior analyst at Rethink Research: “The standard of entries for the Small Cell Forum awards is always very high, but this year the judges’ task was harder than ever,” she said.
“As the small cell evolves to become the heart of the HetNet, there are many new technologies driving the platform forward, and this was apparent in the diversity of the entries,” she explained. “The judges were particularly impressed to see innovations which are pushing the boundaries of the platform, combined with entries that highlighted large-scale commercial deployments with measurable impact.”
Parallel Wireless were shortlisted in four categories, picking up the awards for Excellence in Commercial Deployment both for the Urban category – with its work on mass transit systems in Singapore – and the Rural & Remote category for its deployment at Super Bowl 50. SpiderCloud Wireless took the Enterprise deployment category and Nokia, with T-Mobile and Qualcomm, the residential award, one of two wins for Nokia on the night.
For ip.access it was night of company and personal triumph. The company’s new VIPER platform won the prestigious Judges’ Choice Award while Founder and CTO Nick Johnson collected the Outstanding Contribution to the Industry Award in recognition of his long-term leadership and role in the Forum over many years. Also from ip.access, Neil Piercy was recognized for his development work within Small Cell Forum on Virtualization. Lisa Garza from Cisco also picked up an Outstanding Contribution Award for her leadership of Small Cell Forum marketing.
Other winners on the night included Mike Cronin from Node-H who was recognized for his work in the Forum’s Interoperability Group; Reliance Jio & AirHop Communications; Softbank; Vodafone; Huawei; the Vodafone Foundation; and CommScope – who picked up the prize in the category that attracted the most entries, the small cell technology and business case innovation category.
Congratulating all the winners, Small Cell Forum Chair Alan Law said: “The fact that the business case category attracted the most entries this year shows how far this industry has come – it’s a technology that is now making a real, demonstrable and commercial difference for operators, for businesses and for consumers.”
Click here to view this years winners and their projects »
About Small Cell Forum
Small Cell Forum works to drive the wide-scale adoption of small cells and accelerate the delivery of integrated HetNets. We are not a standards organization but partner with organizations that inform and determine standards development. We are a carrier-led organization. This means our operator members establish requirements that drive the activities and outputs of our technical groups. Today our members are driving solutions that include small cell/Wi-Fi integration, SON evolution, virtualization of the small cell layer, driving mass adoption via multi-operator neutral host, ensuring a common approach to service APIs to drive commercialisation and the integration of small cells into 5G standards evolution. The SCF board includes Airspan, AT&T, Cisco, Ericsson, Huawei, Intel, ip.access, NEC, Nokia, Qualcomm, Reliance Jio, Softbank, Spidercloud, Sprint and Vodafone.
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