The role and impact of the Small Cell Forum’s Release Program · The role and impact of the Small...

The role and impact of the Small Cell Forum’s Release Program

Lead Author | Caroline Gabriel, Research Director February 2014

The Small Cell Forum’s Release Program

2 ©Maravedis-Rethink 2014

Foreword The mission of the Small Cell Forum is very clear - to accelerate the adoption of small cell technologies across a variety of use cases from residential to enterprise to public access. ‘Accelerate’ is the operative word here. The task of proving the small cell concept to the mobile operator community is largely accomplished, and Maravedis-Rethink’s research shows that, by the end of the decade, over three-quarters of carriers will have sizeable commercial deployments. But, as with any new technology, there are factors which can either hasten or delay roll-outs, and hence influence the tipping point moment when the sector achieves the economies of scale which are essential to long-term success. The aim of the Release Program is to help address some of the issues which can hold back mass-scale deployment, including establishing business cases and best practice as well as addressing technology challenges. A shared body of knowledge based on real world experiences and developments can greatly boost confidence in a platform, and accelerate time-to-market by reducing risk. There is also an important role of keeping small cells, and the progress in the technology, at the front of carriers’ minds with a flow of messaging. In this white paper, we assess the significance of the Release Program initiative in building commitment to small cells, and its impact on operator and ecosystem confidence so far, as well as its likely role going forward.

Table of Contents: Foreword 2

1. Introduction: The Release Program 3

2. Key objectives – confidence and acceleration 4 a. Crossing the chasm 4 b. The contribution of the Release Program 6 c. The opportunity to influence deployments of small cells 6

3. Critical operator requirements for small cell deployment 7

a. Building on early Forum work 7 b. The changing operator issues 8

4. The impact of Releases One and Two – Residential and Enterprise 9 5. Urban small cells 12

Conclusions and looking ahead 13



1. Introduction: The Release Program

The first Release, published at Mobile World Congress in February 2013 and published in June, targeted residential femtocells, while the next, published in December 2013, is focused on enterprise. This year will see a two-stage project centered on the urban public access, or metrocell, use case. Future additions will target rural/remote deployment, integration into HetNets, and further down the line, the ‘internet of things’. Each Release provides a base of case studies, white papers, technical and deployment guides and many other documents, which create a pool of knowledge to help establish the business case and best practice around small cells. The nature of the content is driven by operator requirements, fed in by Forum members, and builds on experiences and best practice of some early deployers as well as the expertise of vendors and technology developers. The resulting framework allows operators and vendors to share experiences and aims to reduce risk by providing blueprints and business models on which all carriers can draw. Taken together, a Release can provide a handbook for deployment, saving considerable time for carriers, and also identify new challenges and opportunities to add value. The Forum has published more than 50 new and revised documents since the program was launched, providing a considerable body of knowledge and information. Release Two, for instance, consists of over 20 new or completely revised documents to help address barriers to small cell deployment in the enterprise and to provide a comprehensive blueprint. This resource base includes market drivers analysis; a comprehensive business case; an enterprise reference architecture; use cases for SON (self-optimizing networks); and documents addressing Wi-Fi and enterprise IT integration, and backhaul.

Figure 1. The Release Program overview 2013-2014 Source: Small Cell Forum



Although the working groups which manage and contribute to the Releases consist of a mixture of vendors, operators and other industry players, operator involvement has always been particularly important for increasing credibility among their peers, and to help create a unified set of requirements for suppliers. This has been a powerful effect of many wireless industry groups where carriers have taken a key role, such as the NGMN and OMA. Both of these have created comprehensive knowledge bases and also drawn together their members’ requirements to present a unified message to the vendor community. 2. Key objectives: confidence and acceleration

a) The need for a leap forward: As with any new technology, small cells have followed a cycle of adoption. Deployment in each of the initial markets – residential, enterprise and urban – has been pioneered by a few early movers. In the early stages, these provided many valuable lessons but were not enough to create a mass market. The economies of scale which help make the business case for large-scale small cell networks compelling clearly rely on a significant percentage of carriers rolling out networks. One of the goals of the industry and the Forum, then, is to help the small cell market to cross the famous chasm – from being the preserve of innovators to achieving widespread adoption – at the earliest possible stage.

Figure 2. Position of various small cell categories on the classic technology adoption lifecycle, in Maravedis-Rethink’s assessment

Urban Enterprise

Residential



The residential sector has made the leap, and devices formerly known as femtocells are now becoming well established and have reached the ‘early majority’ stage. This is an achievement for which the Forum can claim some credit, especially in terms of convincing the mobile world that the small cell approach was viable and would deliver real benefits. The technology still needs to leap the chasm in the enterprise and urban environments, but this is a question of ‘when’, not ‘if’. There is no serious dispute that small cells will be an important part of the mobile landscape in all environments, so the Forum’s challenge has moved on quite significantly thanks to the success of its work in laying the foundations. The pace of change has altered too. Release One combined five years of accumulated work, while Release Two took about nine months to complete. Release Three will follow only three months later, though many of its components will have been in the making for over a year. That indicates how the market need for a one-stop deployment resource is intensifying as small cells become an accepted part of operators’ strategies, and network planning departments are put under pressure to deliver. Before that occurs on a wide scale, there are still barriers in the way of the technology leaping the chasm in enterprise and urban environments. As we shall see, these are different from those of the early days of femtocells, with greater emphasis on the business case, but a common factor is that operator confidence will be critical. Any industry relies on cutting edge players to take the initial plunge and they provide valuable insights into the potential of a technology, but their models are usually too expensive and specialized to be widely replicated. Most MNOs (mobile network operators) have no wish to live at the cutting edge, and will not embark on large-scale deployments of small cells until the business case, the costs, and standards-based interoperability are all well established. They will also be in a better position to move quickly if they have templates to use, rather than having to work out their own technology and business cases from scratch. From the point of view of the pioneers, the incentive to share some of their experiences is to bring forward the point at which there is a mass market, creating scale and subsequent cost benefits for all. Likewise, the supplier ecosystem – providers of equipment, backhaul, services, software and components – will accelerate its development efforts once it sees significant operator confidence and commitment, which in turn boosts the availability of competitive kit and services.



b) The contribution of the Release program:

The Small Cell Forum’s Release Program is essential to this necessary progression from cutting edge to mainstream. It aims to reduce carrier risk and kickstart mass-scale deployment by providing a single point at which to access a wide variety of information, advice and best practice. The whole small cell industry can gain confidence from a single source of reference material of this kind as well as reducing risk and time to market:

• Operators: They can harness the case studies and the recommendations of their peers to help develop their small cell strategies with confidence. They can access up-to-date information on the latest technology developments and understand the steps, and challenges, involved in bringing a large network to market. Best practice and shared lessons are offered by early movers in order to encourage broader adoption and so drive the economies of scale from which they will benefit also.

• Vendors: Suppliers of all elements of small cell technology and services can use the

Release documents to understand operator thinking and challenges, which can then shape the development of new offerings in line with those requirements. That boosts vendors’ confidence that their roadmaps will be aligned to customer needs. Fostering early technology alignment through standardization and interoperability testing helps reduce development costs in the longer term and these savings can be passed on to operators.

• Others: There are many other participants in the small cell ecosystem, including regulators, municipalities, enterprises the investment community and partner industry bodies, which can tap into a collective overview of the main issues in small cell deployment and how operators are thinking.

c) The opportunity to influence deployment plans:

The overall objective, then, is clear – to build the knowledge and confidence which will encourage operators to press the go button on their small cell plans, and encourage many suppliers across the ecosystem to accelerate the process of bringing competitive solutions to market, to meet the carriers’ needs. The effect is already clear in the residential market, and there is significant opportunity to influence operators’ deployment timescales in other sectors too, and therefore build ecosystem confidence and enthusiasm. According to a recent snapshot survey of over 20 operators worldwide., all with commitments to small cell deployment, by Maravedis-Rethink, only one-quarter of MNOs which plan commercial public access roll-outs between 2014 and 2018 have a definite date to deploy. The rest have timescale flexibility of between six months and three years, depending on various factors. This mainly applies to the urban applications, where the need to



reduce risk and understand best practice is most urgent, and hence where the Release Program can play a significant role. By contrast, in many markets, most operators already have commercial residential small cell deployments, or a firm date for implementation, because of the increased confidence level in this segment.

Figure 3. Deployment timescale flexibility among operators committed to small cells (% of respondents) Source: MaRe survey January 2014 3. Critical knowledge requirements among operators The goal of any industry body, then, is to help put the conditions in place which will move the operators to the earliest end of their deployment timescale range. Those factors relate to a wide range of issues, some commercial and some technical or logistical, which are still considered uncertain by carriers when planning roll-outs.

a) Building on early Forum work: It is important, at this point, to place the Release Program in the context of the broader work of the Small Cell Forum. In many ways, the program is a codification of many projects undertaken by the Forum’s workgroups to create a unified platform for this new approach. Some of the early achievements of the group included:

• Defining the Iuh specification, which underpins the interoperability that is essential to the residential business case. This was agreed, from a total of about 15 proposals on the table, and submitted to the 3GPP for standardization in Release 8, a process which took less than a year, probably a record in wireless standards. This prefigured the

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Time to deploy agreed 6-‐12 months 12-‐24 months 24-‐36 months



approach which the Release Program would adopt by taking operator requirements as the starting point and building a unified set of specifications around those.

• Brokering a three-way agreement on small cell management, with the Broadband

Forum, whose TR69 was adopted as the basis, and the 3GPP. Avoiding the reinvention of the wheel is an important goal of the Release Program, which will often draw on experience and technology found in other segments.

• One of the critical objectives of the Program is to reduce time to market, and this

builds on another important contribution made by the Forum in this respect, the creation of interoperability testing processes and plugfests. The first, for the new Iuh spec, was held in late 2009.

b) The changing operator issues:

Early work on interoperability, interference management and backhaul helped to communicate that these issues could be addressed, and this was essential to ensure that the small cell concept gained acceptance at all. Once it had, the next step was to ease the path of small cells into broad commercial adoption, which is where the Release Program stepped in. Residential Enterprise Urban Business model/monetization

X X X

Backhaul issues X Integration with other networks eg macro, WiFi

X X X

Automation and management

X X

Access to optimal sites

X

TCO X X X Securing partnerships X X Figure 4. Barriers to full-scale deployment in three small cell use cases Source: MaRe survey January 2014 Figure 4 shows the main factors which operators cite as potential brakes on wide-scale small cell deployments. The smaller number of issues facing residential markets highlights the relative simplicity and greater maturity of this segment, and the fact that operators have had longer to address problems and share best practice – partly thanks to Release One. However, some issues remain important in all sectors, notably those related to cost, integration and business model. All of these are, to a large extent, movable feasts, with operators’ requirements changing with new market demands. For instance, initial interest largely centered just on improving coverage and capacity at affordable cost, but now carriers



are considering additional business model impact such as value added services based on location or personalization. Similarly, site and backhaul issues always figure high on the list of barriers to urban deployment, but respondents’ requirements in these areas have matured – they are no longer thinking just in terms of securing any available sites with backhaul and power, but the best located sites to deliver optimal performance and efficiency. The Forum’s work has helped ensure that the initial backhaul challenges have largely been addressed, and the amount of time and money invested in doing that is a powerful endorsement of its ability to define problems and mobilize different ecosystem players to respond. With the Release Program, much of that response from the industry can be codified and opened to all. Not that topics like backhaul ever go away, but the newer release documents show that operators have moved on from asking ‘is this feasible at all?’ to considering issues of practical deployment like backhaul optimization. One of the tasks of the Release Program is to reflect these changing priorities, as seen in the types of documents included at various stages. In the early stages of the market, although the Forum did business case work, many of its energies were directed to fundamental engineering issues like defining the network architecture. In the newer Releases, there is a heavier emphasis on detailed business modelling and best practice – activities which would not have been possible without the initial work done on making the technology workable. Those changing goalposts will continue to be reflected in the future updates to the Releases, which will be most valuable when they function as an organic body of knowledge. All the issues cited in the previous section are complex ones which will require effort and input from many elements of the market. Yet one of the biggest challenges for a new technology is communicating those efforts, establishing a collective view of the key priorities, and ensuring that the community has access to all the latest progress. The Forum does not exist to solve the problems per se, but to bring together all the valuable knowledge, experience and ideas which will help to bring down the barriers and boost deployer confidence. 4. Impact of Releases One and Two, Residential and Enterprise How far have the first two Releases helped to address the challenges outlined in the previous section, and therefore helped with the objectives of accelerating confidence and uptake? The simplest proof point of the impact of the first Releases is the sheer volume of downloads. The total is now close to 50,000 within the first year of Release One being published. The items which are downloaded most frequently mirror closely the key issues cited by the operators and vendors – backhaul, business case proofs, network architecture choices and the complexities of dealing with interference and interworking.



The numbers, combined with the close mapping to real world issues, indicate the strength of a framework based on operator requirements. This is a vital element of the program. The process of gathering the resources goes far beyond just collecting and organizing existing documents. The Forum goes through a series of steps to define what elements are needed for a release to be comprehensive, to validate those choices with operator members, and then to commission the relevant documents in a structured way. A large proportion of the resources on offer would not be accessible to most organizations without the Releases, leaving them to reinvent the wheel in many areas. In other words, the documents are relevant to the commercial concerns of the deployers, and therefore provide usable handbooks, something that is vital to the impact of the program going forward. Residential Enterprise Business model/monetization

Deployment case studies; femtocell business case

Enterprise business case white paper

Backhaul issues [SCF078] addresses enterprise backhaul. Not sure if critical though.

Integration with other networks eg macro, WiFi

Interference management

Multitechnology small cells

Architecture, automation and management

HeNB network architecture

Enterprise network architecture; synchronization for LTE small cells

TCO Femtocell business case

Enterprise business case

Figure 5. Examples of Release documents addressing the most critical operator challenges This is illustrated in Figure 5, which highlights some of the most downloaded documents, and shows how they map to the critical challenges outlined in Figure 4. Of course, other documents may have fewer downloads, but are essential to address very specialized areas of technical knowledge. In the survey of operators with small cell plans, there was additional validation of the first two releases and their value. An overwhelming 85% found the Release Program ‘very valuable’ or ‘valuable’ to their small cell strategy and planning. Drilling down on the reasons for that value (Figure 6), it is seen that, in addition to general interest and knowledge gathering, Release documents are being used directly to help in some critical aspects of operators’ planning or decision making about small cells. About three-quarters have found Release material valuable for overall strategy, two-thirds to help address technical questions, and over half to contribute to business modelling exercises. And 45% have used the resource for actual deployment plans (a lower number because some respondents are not at that stage of activity yet).



Figure 6. Areas where operators have found Release documents of practical value in their small cell planning Source: MaRe survey January 2014 In the residential and enterprise Releases, where significant trials and deployments are already under way, there is a clear focus on business cases and learning from the real world experiences of others. This is seen in Figure 7, which highlights some of the categories of document that operators have found most valuable to input to the various processes above.

Figure 7. Most valuable categories of Release program documents according to operators Source: MaRe survey January 2014 (respondents were asked to name their top three)

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Input to business modelling

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Best pracFce and case studies

Reference scenarios

Deployment guidelines

Backhaul advice

Network architecture

Procurement guidelines

White papers and market studies

Standards updates

Regulatory details



When asked to name the three categories which were most valuable in the current releases, business case material was placed in the top three by 45% of operators with small cell commitments, followed by case studies/best practice information and reference scenarios. There is still considerable value attached to technology and deployment guidelines, but these are even more important in an earlier stage sector such as Urban, where many of the technical issues have not yet been fully addressed. 5. Urban Small Cells Urban public access small cells are the focus of Releases Three and Four. The fact that this theme is effectively split into two stages illustrates the complexity and variety of technology and business issues. The first stage revolves around the ‘foundations’ of a mass market platform – establishing the market requirements; demonstrating commercial viability; identifying and addressing barriers in all the key areas (radio, architecture, backhaul, regulation, deployment and services). Future releases will focus more heavily on best practice and the experiences of the early adopters. Urban small cells are at an earlier stage in commercial terms than the residential and enterprise products, hence the need to focus initially on the drivers for the market and the enablers that must be in place to fulfil that potential. That relative immaturity suggests the Release Program must take a somewhat different approach in this sector since it will have far less commercial deployment experience on which to draw. However, that also means it will have an even greater role to play in building confidence in a platform that still carries many uncertainties, and potentially a greater impact on accelerating the plans of operators and their suppliers and partners. This also means that the documents themselves will have a different emphasis since the ecosystem members’ information needs will vary from those of a more established market segment. This is seen in the ecosystem’s attitude to the categories of information they most want from an Urban Release (Figure 8). As the sector is less mature, there is a greater concentration on the basic issues of deploying the networks and of agreeing on the architecture. This is especially true as many planning and deployment issues will be far more complex in the public access area, putting a greater focus on areas such as backhaul. There is also eagerness for information on the few case studies which already exist in the urban environment and the beginnings of a best practice base built around operators’ and suppliers’ trials and experiences.



Figure 8. Most valuable categories in an Urban release, according to operators Source: MaRe survey January 2014 (respondents were asked to name their top three) Conclusion and looking ahead: To summarize, the Small Cell Forum’s Release Program has had an important impact on operator confidence and ability to move ahead with commercial roll-outs, which in turn stimulates the entire ecosystem. A collective take on the key issues and challenges; a rich body of knowledge and the latest information; and best practice resources are all valuable in reducing uncertainty, cost and time to market. The progress made by this sector over the past five years has been rapid, given the technology and ecosystem complexities involved. The Forum has played a key role because of its ability to tap into the real requirements and issues of its operator members; and as a hub for knowledge that would otherwise not have been accessible to most players. That coordination of the ideas and expertise in the sector has been codified in the Release Program in a way that directly addresses key operator concerns and gives them the tools to cross the chasm. That, in turn, has helped the sector achieve the first goal of any new technology – to convince the market it is needed – and to start to address questions of ‘when’ not ‘if’, as well as complex issues of business value. Operators and vendors are using the resources actively to feed into their strategies and planning processes and we are confident that will have a positive effect on accelerating roll-out of small cells across the various markets, and building the necessary economies of scale.

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Best pracFce and case studies

Backhaul advice

Business cases

Deployment guidelines

White papers and market studies

Reference scenarios

Procurement guidelines

Standards updates

Regulatory details



Not that the work will be finished of course. The Forum has an ambitious roadmap for adding new use cases once the major Urban double release is published, and there will also be the effort of keeping current resources updated to reflect technology and market change in a fast-moving segment. The next topics to be addressed are likely to be Rural/Remote use cases, and then a further look at the issues of the HetNet, building on that done in the Urban release Increasing focus on heterogeneous networking through the Releases will, in itself, be an endorsement of the success of the small cell industry and, within that, the Release Program. When small cells are being integrated closely with other technologies in heterogeneous roll-outs, it will be a clear sign that they have reached significant scale in operators’ strategies, and have taken their place at the heart of the networks.

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