SCF Chair Alan Law reports back from a busy week in Dallas.
It was foggy when I left London to head out to the Small Cells Americas event in Dallas. And strangely enough, the first day of the show also saw Dallas shrouded in fog. But – if you will pardon the pun – inside the venue, the progress being made by the small cells industry was clear to see.
We staged an informative workshop throughout that first day – with our Small Cell Champions leading the way. The workshop, delivered to a packed room, comprised of case study presentations from industry pioneers including AT&T, SoftBank, Nokia, SpiderCloud, Parallel Wireless. Airvana and NexTech shared a superb video on a successful small cell deployment in a coliseum. If you missed it – you can access all the presentations from our website. Our work items Champions also gave updates – abridged versions of the presentations from Rome – on the six main work areas we are currently tackling.
When the conference itself got underway the next day, there were some great speakers and a really positive buzz around the venue. I particularly liked hearing Tareq Amin of Reliance Jio, who is a new board member for SCF, talking about what he described as the world’s largest small cell deployment and the way they were striving to meet their goal of deploying 1,700 small cells a day. Tareq concentrated on the automation challenges for that scale of deployment and set the tone for the rest of the conference.
Our ‘Crossing the Chasm‘ report – which I presented to the opening session of the conference – shows an industry which has already reached some 12 million small cells deployed, which is continuing to experience double digit growth in the SOHO and residential market, and is also facing an explosion of deployment in the Enterprise space.
The caliber of those attending and giving up their time to chair sessions, make presentations and speak on panels resulted in an interesting and informative event. From walking the floor, speaking with exhibitors and SCF members, I felt fully justified in explaining to the journalists and analysts I met, that this is the year for Small Cells. As detailed in our report, it’s clear to me that we’ve moved on from the first phase of the small cell industry – the ‘why’ phase. What matters now to operators all over the world is not why but ‘how?’. As usual, David Chambers has of Think Small Cell has delivered an excellent show report.
We also held our own Plenary meetings on Wednesday and Thursday, co-located with Small Cells Americas. We made rapid progress towards the next update Release on Enterprise for MWC16 and our next major Release HetNet & SON, planned for the Small Cells World Summit in May 2016.
If you’d like to get involved and have an impact on the way we drive the industry, please get in touch.