Company name: Wireless Infrastructure Group
Company overview: Wireless Infrastructure Group (WIG) is a leading infrastructure services provider, delivering high-quality indoor and outdoor connectivity infrastructure across the UK, Spain, The Netherlands and Ireland. For more than a decade WIG has built and continues to maintain more than 2,200 sustainable communications assets that improve mobile coverage across rural communities, inside buildings, stadiums and on city streets.
Your name and title: Craig Birchenough, COO for Indoor Networks
Q1. Your company is a member of Small Cell Forum, so what is your view on the future of small cells as 5G comes in?
In a literal sense, Wireless Infrastructure Group (WIG) is a genuine pioneer. We were one of the first neutral hosts in Europe, which is why we founded the European Wireless Infrastructure Association (EWIA) to give alternative deployers a voice – especially in a regulatory context.
And ensuring our part of the ecosystem has a seat at the table in terms of regulation and technology development is the reason we joined the SCF board. For the past few years, SCF has had a unique focus on ensuring technology development takes account of the specific needs of infrastructure-as-a-service providers and, importantly, their enterprise customers.
Small cells are an integral part of WIG’s infrastructure toolkit. Not just in the context of 5G, where they are clearly important for densification, but right now in deployments like our partnerships with Aberdeen City Council and Transport for West Midlands, where we are using street furniture for public and private small cell networks that transform mobile coverage and capacity. With the support of our mobile network customers, these partnerships have created the UK’s first and largest C-RAN small cell deployments.
Q2. How do you see the industry changing at the moment and what can the Forum do to address/improve/or enhance these changes?
I think SCF has called it right. It’s already focussing on some of the key issues impacting our business. The big change is recognition in government and industry of the role for infrastructure service providers like us in enabling better mobile across enterprise, industry, venues and public spaces. This means strong partnerships between MNOs and infrastructure-as-a-service providers are going to be crucial to delivering the secure, resilient and flexible public and private cellular indoor coverage required for the digital transformation of enterprise and industry. SCF has these partnerships at the heart of its work.
WIG will continue to work both at a board level in SCF on policy and a technical level in the working groups to ensure support for important industry initiatives like JOTS and the current work on technical requirements for neutral host deployments, which is looking at the architectural roadmap for infrastructure-as-a-service in a broad range of contexts.
Q3. In relation to your business, what are some the key technologies /or polices that are driving the industry (or parts of the industry) forward at the moment, and how can we progress further and faster?
Private cellular networks are an important part of our offering to enterprise. Communicating the value and resilience of private cellular, especially for operational connectivity, I think should be a key area of focus for SCF and it’s great to be working on deployment blueprints for scalable solutions.
But I also think that, as an industry, we need to be better at managing expectations around technology roadmaps. Within the industry, we all know that while there are plenty of trials of 5G private networks, the majority of private networks supporting critical operational activities are essentially LTE networks and that LTE can deliver everything the majority of enterprise customers currently want and need. All of WIG’s networks provide a seamless path to 5G and can deliver private cellular functionality. The message our industry needs to put out to business and government is that they don’t need to wait for standalone 5G before investing in private cellular.