Small Cell Technology is Burgeoning Business for Multi-Architecture Chip Makers

A new study shows that small cell technology in the 21st century is only going to become even more popular. According to In-Stat (News - Alert), small cell tech will soon be bringing in somewhere in the neighborhood of $14 billion by the end of 2015. Small cell tech is being viewed as one of the more important advances in the wireless phone market and because of this, companies are looking at a multi-chip architecture in order to find the best way to take advantage.

The main problem that cellular providers are running into is that mobile data usage is increasing at a massive rate. Applications on smartphones that call for a lot of upload or download usage is doubling mobile data from one year to the next. Wireless providers are having real problems keeping up with this pace. This has sparked what In-Stat is calling a battleground and multiple chip architectures are going hard after capturing the crown in the small cell market.

That $14 billion mark is a market worth winning, especially when you take into account that In-Stat's latest business models are showing as many as 160.3 million small cells active or being activated over the next three years. 

One senior analyst for In-Stat, Chris Kissel, laid out why the small cell market is one so many companies are looking to capture. “Small cells cover areas where macrocells would be overkill and are essential to the success of heterogeneous networking (HetNet), the term used to describe modern cellular infrastructure architecture.” Kissel explained that HetNet is the practice of combining small cells with Wi-Fi networks and current cellular infrastructure in order to improve the uplink and downlink capacities.

The small cell category is actually made up of three different kinds of cells that all service a different number of users and provide varying ranges of access. Femtocells (News - Alert) serve as little as four users at a distance of 15-50 meters. Picocells can serve around 100 users and microcells can accommodate up to 1,000 users and have a range of 2-3 kilometers (1-1.5 miles).