On Thursday, I am moderating an ITEXPO (News - Alert) Miami 2013 session focused on small cells. The session, “The Big Challenge with Small Cells,” will take place at 1:30-2:15.

Femtocells (News - Alert) were hard for me to believe from the beginning, since the customer was in fact backhauling for the carrier. And most customers did not have enough bandwidth for their own needs.

Now, the small cells are again in the network and I see it being more economical. Small cells make sense.

Here is the session description.

Enthusiasm for small cells is rising, and some carriers have launched broad deployment strategies. Many, however, expect to wait as many as three years before adopting a small cell strategy. Why? While backhaul questions have largely been addressed, standards development remains an open issue. In order for small cells to provide the interference-free, optimized network connectivity that is expected, the industry must come to agreement on standards to support small cell development. This session will discuss the importance of small cells as a key element of the wireless landscape of the future, how small cell adoption can be accelerated, and what challenges still remain.

Our speakers come from the different approaches to solving the deployments needs. 

A key ingredient to small cell deployment is the ability to deliver the traffic almost immediately. What are small cell connectors and how do they do they connect with the electronics? My point here is that small cells may require a backhaul network. Here I think Taqua (News - Alert) will give us some insight as they enable Wi-Fi.

The next set of questions, is about ad hoc provisioning for when a parking lot is turned into a carnival? Or a neighborhood gets washed away? In this case, Spider Cloud Wireless will give us some insight as to how self -organizing networks can help.

The next question then comes to costs and economies of scale. Most carriers do not like to single source their networks, since it leaves them vulnerable to price increases and bankruptcy. Avaya (News - Alert) comes into play here, as they have tools to verify compliance with standards and carrier specific implementation.

These companies also have knowledge about the needs of the enterprise for these solutions. 

Small Cells need big money investors. So orders have to be macro for small cells to takeover.