ABI Research (News - Alert) today released a new report entitled "The Rise of Public Venue Small Cells" which profiles the small cell and carrier Wi-Fi market. Specifically, the report states that public venue small cells, an emerging class of small cell equipment, are expected to experience a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 67 percent to reach $3.1 billion by 2018.

The public venue small cell category is counted as a subset of the existing enterprise small cell segment, but is expected to represent half of the entire segment within five years.

“With the rapid growth in mobile traffic and data demand shifting to low mobility locations — the majority of them indoors — mobile operators are closing the gap between capacity and demand with solutions ranging from the traditional active and passive distributed antenna systems (DAS) to Carrier Wi-Fi, and this emerging category of public venue small cells,” said Nick Marshall, principal analyst for mobile networks at ABI Research, in a statement.

The deployment, installation and operation of small cells in public venues are fundamentally different than street-level small cell deployments as dozens, up to hundreds, of small cells are being densely packed together. As such, backhaul and power supply requirements in particular are quite different.

The challenges faced by public venue small cells are also different as interference is more about many small cells rather than surrounding macro cells.

Of course, the advantages of public venue small cells include the fact that they are designed to offer network access directly where it's needed and, perhaps most importantly, at a lower cost than macrocells or DAS systems.

Major vendors identified in this market include Ubiquisys (News - Alert), Alcatel-Lucent, SpiderCloud and Devicescape.

In other recent ABI Research news, the research firm stated that in the coming months, G.hn will formally become a deployed member of the wired networking market.

The company also named Jasper Wireless as the leading M2M Connected Device Platform vendor earlier in the month.

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