8:00 AM As Infonetics Research says small-cell volumes won't be big enough to support the current crop of vendors, I've chosen some potential M&A candidates
Why hasn't Cisco bought it's long-time small-cell partner ip.access? They've been working together for so long now -- mainly for AT&T and that femto rollout -- perhaps they are set in their ways.
But now that Cisco is working on an LTE small cell, I wonder if that kind of product development needs the sort of expertise that ip.access has brought in house.
John Chambers told Bloomberg a few weeks ago that Cisco planned small acquisitions in the areas of video, collaboration, virtual data centers, mobility and security. I just wonder if small cells is going to be one of those acquisitions.
This is the market for high density urban areas in the far east and India. Don't be so quick to write it off. Korea will be the first others will have to follow.
Great video - I agree with every word you said. I think that is addition to small-cells, there is the backhauling subject that is still open and will be consolidate at a later stage
Thanks, Nir. That's a good point. In this blog I focused only on the access point side of the small-cell market, but there are other areas that will also be ripe for consolidation -- wireless backhaul, chipsets are examples.
I don't think I'm writing it off. I'm saying some kind of consolidation looks certain given the Infonetics Research view that small-cell volumes won't be big enough to support all the players who want to get into this space.
I think that can include not just the access point vendors, but lots of other players such as all the companies with backhaul products for small cells, the chipset vendors, gateway providers, or even the analytics firms that help operators determine where small cells should be located.
Seems to me it's not clear just how big the market is actually going to be.
Good point about South Korea and India. I'd like to know more about how operators in those markets are getting on with their small-cell plans and deployments.
The market is taking longer to develop than people thought.
With residential femto's its mature but larger metro cell / pico technologies are still in their early stages. Wi-Fi offload is also dampening small cell adoption.
In addition there are a lot of pieces (backhaul, OSS, processes) that need to be in place to make none residential small cells to work. I think this complexity is putting operators off and delaying decisions.
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