It may come as little surprise to hear that the enthusiastic response to Release Four has been accompanied by increased online interest in its predecessor. After all, Release Three and Release Four each cover important facets of the rollout of small cells in the urban environment. Together they cover just about everything an operator or vendor could need to know about urban small cells to date.

‘To date’ is the key term here. There is a clear industry thirst to understand the basics of this new market and how it works – or, more accurately, how it is working right now. Hence the enormous success of the case studies paper in particular. This paper, out of all the Release Four output, is second only in the download list to the overview paper.

Our thanks for the popularity of this paper are due to our colleagues and associates working in the US, China, Korea and elsewhere, who are making urban small cell rollout a reality. That said, we weren’t surprised at the number of case studies involving urban small cells covered in this document. We were, however, impressed at the breadth of the applications so early in the life of urban small cells – and the ingenuity of the deployments. Unlike small cells for residential or small business applications this isn’t about standalone small cells requiring little more than a broadband connection. This is an extraordinarily diverse market where a number of small cells could need to work alongside Wi-Fi, DAS, repeaters, macro or any combination of these technologies, with all the varied approaches to backhaul, network architecture and other technical considerations that this implies.

Issues like these are, of course, the focus of much of the supporting content of Release Four and Release Three. So while the case studies and overview papers can quite reasonably be seen as the ‘greatest hits’ of our recent output and, in our view, are as good a summary of what urban small cells can offer as most interested parties can get, they are only the start of the story.

Find out more from the release site.