Telecom network vendor Alcatel-Lucent in partnership with Qualcomm will launch its Enterprise Small Cell device in early 2015.
The Alcatel-Lucent small cell solution will enable telecom operators to extend 3G, 4G LTE and Wi-Fi connectivity and coverage into the office for in-building customers.
According to Signals Research Group, almost 78 percent of the global mobile traffic will be handled by small cells by 2020.
Alcatel-Lucent plans to include LTE and multi-standard residential cells as well. Earlier, the company strategy was to tap the raipdly growing enterprise market.
The 9962 Multi-Standard Enterprise Cell allows telecom operators to meet their business customer needs to deliver in-building wireless services to support continued growth in data traffic and VoLTE service.
This will support both 3G and 4G LTE connectivity through a single chipset with features like carrier aggregation, said Alcatel-Lucent.
A statement from Alcatel-Lucent said the Qualcomm chipset FSM9955 used in the small cell solution also provides the ability to migrate the radio access technologies from 3G to 4G.
Alcatel-Lucent expects multi-standard and LTE-only solutions for the home to be generally available in 2015, and is utilizing accelerated development methods by leveraging its efforts currently underway for the 9962 Multi-Standard Enterprise cell.
Neville Meijers, VP of business development, Qualcomm Technologies, said: “By developing a power efficient chipset that supports 3G, 4G or a mix of technologies, we are offering our customers more flexibility in how they deploy.”
Within a year of announcing the Enterprise solution, Alcatel-Lucent demonstrated it at the Small Cells World Summit in June and the company is now using it in multiple customer trials.
Nokia Networks in small cell market
Nokia Networks, a rival of Alcatel-Lucent, today said its small cell portfolio is spearheaded by new innovations – a double-capacity small cell base station Flexi Zone G2 Pico, and an indoor planning service enhanced by 3-D geolocation.
The launches enable operators to cost-effectively build even higher performance HetNets in dense urban areas, sustaining high quality mobile broadband for more subscribers and higher data traffic, said Nokia Networks.
