Summary Bullets:
- Conventional wisdom says operators won’t share small cells.
- There’s reason to believe that could change in some areas.
“Operators don’t like to share.”
We hear it all the time. If small cells are the hot new toy this holiday season, we’ve already been warned that operators are not going to want to share them. There are some good reasons to use common, shared infrastructure (whether small cells or backhaul or something similar): to distribute deployment and installation costs; to overcome the resistance of municipalities and other site owners to clusters of hanging boxes; and, for indoor/enterprise deployments, to address operator neutrality preferences. However, we’re told that operators want to control their own fate. They want their small-cell networks optimized for their unique needs. So – at least initially, while they’re trying to climb the learning curve of small-cell networks – they don’t want to have to play nice with anyone else to get what they need. Continue reading “Small Cells: Will Operators Be Willing to Share?”