3 Million Small Base Stations Will Create $2.1 Billion USD Market in 2016

The market research company Infonetics Researh currently estimates the "mini base station" medium-term market. The company believes that 3 million low-power small base stations (including femto, pico and micro base stations) will be sold in 2016, creating a market valued at US$21. Infonetics said that the development of small base stations will require additional spectrum capacity.

According to Stéphane Téral, chief analyst of the mobile infrastructure and operator economics division of Infonetics Research, "Mobile broadband is gradually shifting towards capacity upgrade. Therefore, the primary goal is to use the new low-power from a capacity perspective. Consumption nodes, such as public space micro base stations and WiFi, complement and enhance the macro-cellular level."

Terra has pointed out that dividing the macrocell into smaller base stations is still challenging because of the mutual interference between base stations and backhaul issues. He added: “The question now is: How small can a base station be? Because the smaller the base station, the higher the number of base stations needed to cover an area, and this will determine the true scale of the small base station market.”

Michael Howard, chief analyst and co-founder of Infonetics, said: “Our forecast for small base stations is not an open cheque. The prediction for adopting new technology cellular is based on the technology of small base stations in each city block in 2020. Looking ahead, we made this prediction after a year of solid cooperation between several company analysts and research teams and mobile operators, manufacturers and chip suppliers. We have studied, discussed, questioned and heard - Often on multiple occasions - Voices of major market operators to understand their ideas, plan, test and verify, including their current actual operations, budget, small base station target pricing/size and form factor Requirements, emerging technical issues, ratios of location-sensitive pico base stations to macrocells, and automation of small base stations and coordination with macrocells, etc. During the above steps, we discussed with them about their future years Actual idea."