Small cells will offer operators new opportunities to reach their customers, but they’ll also open up more ways to tick off the subscriber base.

Small cells are tiny, cellular, radio base stations that sit on the edge of the network to increase data speeds and network capacity. The technology first came to the fore a few years ago when 3G femtocells were being used in customers' homes to boost call quality. Now, the devices are ready to go mainstream, with carriers in the US alone preparing to roll out thousands of public access small cells to boost capacity and data speeds of 3G and 4G networks.

Last week, AT&T Inc. said that it will install 40,000 small cells on its network by 2015. Sprint Nextel Corp. tells me they already have over a million CDMA small cells deployed. The carrier is also preparing Long-Term Evolution (LTE) 4G public access small cells for deployment in 2013. In a perfect world, these tiny radios would help carriers deal with problems highlighted by customer experience management (CEM) systems by quickly filling in dead spots of wireless coverage, or adding capacity on overly busy parts of the network.

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— Dan Jones, Site Editor, Light Reading Mobile