Over the past few months, Heavy Reading has been investigating the major challenges mobile operators face in deploying outdoor small cells as a capacity layer to handle data traffic growth in urban settings. Operators such as Softbank have the advantage of leveraging existing fiber links to backhaul small-cell traffic to pooled baseband units in telco central offices in Tokyo's densely populated Ginza district. This "cloud RAN" architecture yields blazing fast download speeds, low latency, high quality, and performance even at the cell edge.

But most operators cannot deploy fiber to backhaul small-cell traffic, especially in the dense core of most U.S. cities. Even with aggregation points at hubs on tall buildings or towers, these carriers will need to establish multiple high-capacity, non-line-of-sight (NLoS) links to pole-mounted or street-level small cells over long distances that are frequently blocked by other buildings or trees. Small-cell backhaul links are often blocked by multiple buildings located about 1 km apart, yet they must deliver full capacity. We expect these same requirements to emerge in European cities, as well.

As major mobile carriers start deploying outdoor small cells in urban settings, they will require a "universal wireless transport" solution for backhaul that combines the following attributes:

This would provide a single toolkit to satisfy a wide range of small-cell backhaul requirements. The combination of NLoS backhaul capacity and range seems critical for cost-effective deployment of the next generation of outdoor small-cell LTE wireless infrastructure for maximum location flexibility. Heavy Reading will be looking for these attributes going forward, as we evaluate NLoS backhaul solutions from the perspective of operators deploying outdoor small cells in urban settings.

— Heavy Reading