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June 2016: Operationalizing Mass-Market Small-Cells and DAS

Executive Summary
Small-cells and Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS) have
been used in mobile networks virtually since the inception of
the industry, but have always been niche solutions in radio
network environments that are dominated by macro-cells.
Within the last decade, industry players have seen massive
network traffic growth, culminating with an increased
interest in small-cells and DAS, and strategies to enable
their mass market adoption. Technology vendors have
honed their small-cell and DAS platforms, and by 2008-09
time-frame, the mobile industry had established the goal for
each small-cell deployment to cost less than USD 5000 on
average.
Today the mobile industry is still struggling in enabling the
mass market adoption of small-cells, which typically cost
between USD 40,000 and 200,000 each and take 15-18
months to deploy. Many indoor environments continue to
lack adequate coverage even in cases where the building
and venue owners or enterprise occupants are willing to pay
for the radio equipment costs. Industry pundits commonly
attribute lack-luster small-cell adoption to back-haul and site
acquisition challenges. However, we contend that the
challenges are more systemic, and a consequence of
current mobile operator processes and procedures, which
are architected primarily for macro-cells. In particular,
macro-cell deployments are driven through structured and
centralized network planning and site acquisition processes.
We believe that these processes need to be decentralized
for small-cell and DAS implementations in a similar manner
to the approaches used in the past for femto-cells. With this
approach the planning processes would focus on managing
the inventory and network parameter optimization for small-
cells and DAS systems, as they are deployed in an ad hoc
manner with opportunistic site acquisition strategies. In
addition, we believe that Centralized SON (C-SON) and
capabilities for quarantining network elements are crucial in
ensuring that small-cell and DAS deployments don’t have
an adverse affect on overall network performance.
While the industry has made tremendous progress with
small-cell and DAS platform technology innovation, we
believe that there is the need to advance modular designs,
and enable more alternatives for small-cell back-haul and
front-haul transmission solutions. Notable examples include
mesh networking, point-to-point and point-to-multi-point
microwave and millimeter wave technologies, and
innovative base-band distribution strategies, which eliminate
the need for dedicated fiber front-haul.
The notion of enabling diverse transmission technologies
and decentralized network planning and site acquisition is
disruptive to traditional operations. However, we believe that
it is necessary for small-cells and DAS to achieve
meaningful market scale.

Introduction
For more than a decade mobile industry rhetoric has
anticipated large scale small-cell and distributed antenna
system (DAS) adoption as being inevitable for mobile
operators to address localized network capacity and
coverage demands. In response to the anticipated demand
for small-cells and DAS, technology vendors have made
tremendous progress in innovating their platform
architectures to lower unit costs, improve performance and
reduce implementation complexity. However, even with
these efforts, small-cell and DAS adoption has languished
relative to market expectations. Small-cells saw initial
success for residential implementations, under the guise of
femto-cells, but have failed to achieve meaningful scale in
other environments, such as outdoors, and in public
venues. DAS solutions have been deployed in large venues
and in some cases in outdoor environments, but to date
have only captured less than 10 percent of the addressable
market.
Many of the challenges associated with small-cells have
been reported in the past. For example, in our 2010 report
entitled Repositioning femto-cells for market success – A
global perspective
(http://www.tolaga.com/Documents/Publications/2010/TolagaReportPositioningFemtoCells1
we identified the need for mobile operators to shift away
from macro-cell centric operational models that taxed small-
cells with onerous implementation complexities. At the time
the mobile industry had the lofty ambition for average small-
cell deployment costs in the order of USD 5000. This is in
stark contrast to small-cell costs today, which commonly
range between USD 40-200,000 in mature markets like the
United States, and with ground leases and back-haul costs
that commonly rival those paid for macro-cellular sites. In
addition to the cost, small-cell deployments are complex
and have protracted time-lines, commonly requiring 15-18
months for zoning approval. The prohibitive costs and
protracted implementation time-lines for small-cells must be
addressed before meaningful market scale can be
achieved.
DAS solutions are expensive and are generally
implemented in large venues, such as sports stadiums,
airports, train stations and campuses. Commonly DAS
implementations are confronted with conflicting commercial
objectives. Traditionally venue owners have favored neutral
host DAS solutions to support multiple mobile operators, but
are generally reticent to pay for cost of the DAS equipment.
Mobile operators prefer opportunities to be the sole
provider, rather than participating in neutral hosts, and are
careful to prioritize their capital resources towards venues
that are of strategic interest and provide adequate returns.
Since mobile coverage is important, a growing number of
venue owners are offering to pay for the DAS equipment
costs and seeking operator support to enable mobile
services. While operators are capitalizing on some of the
DAS investments made by venue owners, the venue owner
commitment is not always sufficient. Even when the DAS
equipment is paid for, operators are still confronted by
network planning and radio equipment costs. They are also
constrained by operational priorities and the ongoing
demands for the DAS solutions they support.
Companies including American Tower, Boingo, Crown
Castle, Extenet, Insite Wireless, and Mobilitie, which
specialize in real estate and infrastructure management, are
capitalizing on the commercial complexities of small-cell
and DAS implementations to provide outsourced neutral
host solutions. While these players are primarily focused on
large indoor venues, Crown Castle has been pursuing an
outdoor DAS (O-DAS) strategy, for which it has acquired
extensive dark-fiber resources and is deploying neutral host
radio nodes in strategic locations. Even though Crown has
spent on average in excess of USD 100,000 for each radio
node, with the lion’s share of its cost being in fiber backhaul,
it is seeing favorable financial yields to drive further
investments. While this is good for Crown Castle and
illustrates the strategic importance of small-cells, we believe
that it is cost prohibitive for mass market small-cell adoption
and illustrates the need for implementation and architectural
changes to enable lower cost deployments.
As the mobile industry grapples with strategies to improve
localized coverage and capacity using small-cells and DAS
solutions, there are a variety of activities that aim to
positively impact market progress. These include:
Efforts on the part of regulators like the FCC in the
United States and infrastructure vendors like Ericsson,
Huawei and Nokia to ease site acquisition challenges.

The densification of radio subsystems to improve small-

cell and remote radio form-factors.

Advancements in operational automation techniques

like SON, and;
 Unlicensed spectrum technology developments to lower
the entry barriers for competitive market solutions.

While small-cell and DAS adoption will benefit from these

market activities, we believe that it will continue to happen
at a glacial pace. Without these operational changes,
mobile operators will continue to favor macro-cell
deployments. In this report, we investigate the changes that
are needed, particularly in the areas of network planning
and site acquisition, and operational automation to
accelerate small-cell and DAS adoption.

Comparing and contrasting small-cells and DAS

While both small-cells and DAS solutions deliver localized
capacity and coverage for mobile networks, conventional
DAS and small-cell architectures are vastly different, see
Exhibit 1. Small-cells are fully contained low power base
stations, which are distributed throughout a network
coverage area and use traditional microwave, copper and
fiber back-haul to connect to small-cell controllers or directly
mobile core networks. When deployed, each operator
normally has its own small-cell radio equipment, rather than
using a neutral host. In contrast, DAS solutions consist of
centralized base station equipment, which connects to
remote antenna and radio infrastructure that is distributed
throughout the coverage area of the DAS. By centralizing
the base station equipment, an operator can deploy and
connect a conventional macro or small-cell base-station to
the DAS infrastructure. DAS is readily implemented with
neutral host architectures, since it allows each operator to
continue to maintain their own base station equipment.
Exhibit 1: Comparison of DAS neutral host and small-cell
solutions to support three mobile operators
Source: Tolaga Research 2016
Mobile operators tend to resist the notion of sharing radio
resources, particularly in the case of small-cells. For this
reason, each of the three small-cell networks depicted in
Exhibit 1 are deployed with parallel equipment, which
generally increases the radio infrastructure requirements
and deployment logistics for multi-operator
implementations. Relative to DAS, each mobile operator
has many more radio nodes to manage in small-cell
implementations, which drives the need for SON based
operational automation.
Technology vendors including Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia,
CommScope/Airvana and SpiderCloud have evolved small-
cell architectures to support a wide variety of deployment
scenarios.
SpiderCloud’s solution incorporates a controller to manage
clusters of small-cells deployed throughout its coverage
footprint. Each SpiderCloud small-cell is a fully functioning
base station, with Ethernet based connectivity to the
controller.
Ericsson has its RBS-6402 and RBS-6501 platforms for
outdoor and in-building applications, respectively. Ericsson
also has its Zero site platform, which has embedded small-
cell functionality in energy efficient street lights.
In 2013, Ericsson introduced its DOT platform, sporting an
architecture that is well suited to relatively small indoor
installations, particularly when nearby macro-cell resources
are already available. Rather than requiring high bandwidth
and low latency CPRI (Common Public Radio Interface)
front-haul connections, the DOT enables a combination of
Ethernet and dedicated fiber front-haul cabling, see Exhibit
2. In particular, each radio node (aka DOT) connects over
Ethernet cable to indoor radio units (IRU) and each IRU
connects over a high bandwidth CPRI front-haul connection
to a digital unit, which is essentially a standard macro or
small-cell base station. Each IRU converts the signals to an
intermediate frequency (IF) (as opposed to RF) that can be
transmitted over dedicated Ethernet cables to the Radio
DOTs. At the DOTs the IF signals are converted to RF and
transmitted through the DOT antennas.
The Ericsson DOT preserves the centralized base station
functionality used for DAS, and can connect to existing
macro or small-cell radio equipment. For example, it might
be connected to a sector of a rooftop macro-cell to provide
coverage inside the building below. While the DOT is not
well suited for neutral host implementations, and its scope
for expansion limited, it is well positioned as a single
operator solution for relatively modest installations, or in
overlaid configurations as part of larger implementations.
Huawei has a similar small-cell portfolio to that of Ericsson,
sporting several conventional small-cell solutions, and its
LampSite platform, which enables a distributed architecture
that is similar to Ericsson’s DOT solution, albeit with radio
units that have greater scalability and output power.
Exhibit 2: Schematic Overview of the Ericsson DOT
Source: Ericsson, 2014
Nokia also has a portfolio of conventional small-cell
solutions comparable to those offered by Ericsson and
Huawei. In addition, Nokia has its Flexizone small-cell
solution, which we believe leads the industry in delivering
DAS-like centralization, without the need for expensive
CPRI front-haul interfaces. It achieves this by placing the
latency sensitive base-band functions of the Physical Layer
(Layer 1) and part of the Data Link Layer (Layer 2) in the
remote radio units, see Exhibit 3. Other players including
Ericsson and Huawei are following similar but different
proprietary approaches. We believe that in the future, most
small-cell clusters will be deployed using this approach
because of the added performance and front-haul
efficiencies that it enables. In addition, we believe that it is
unlikely that standards will be adopted. Instead, each
vendor will maintain its own proprietary front-haul solution;
in many respects paralleling the Abis proprietary interfaces
that were used for GSM back-haul.
In indoor environments, mobile operators do not necessarily
dictate the radio base station equipment vendor that is used
for the small-cell implementation. However, in outdoor
environments, operators generally insist on overlaid small-
cells being provided by the same radio equipment vendor
as their macro-cell underlay (e.g. Ericsson, Huawei or
Nokia) to ensure feature transparency. As a result, small-
cell solutions provided by players who lack macro-cellular
equipment, like Commscope/Airvana and SpiderCloud are
primarily constrained to opportunities in indoor
environments.
While DAS benefits from enabling centralized and dedicated
radio base station equipment for each mobile operator in a
neutral host configuration, there are several challenges that
confront system designers. In particular, the radio signals
from the base-stations must be transported over active DAS
infrastructure when deployed in large installations. This
necessitates dedicated copper or fiber connections as
opposed to shared Ethernet to support the low latency and
high bandwidth needed to ensure the integrity of the radio
signals is maintained. In most cases, CPRI or proprietary
adaptations to CPRI are used.
In addition, neutral host architectures can create conflicts of
interest amongst competing mobile operators. To avoid
these conflicts, infrastructure management companies like
American Tower, Boingo, Crown Castle, Extenet, Insite
Wireless, and Mobilitie provide independent neutral host
solutions. While these players typically focus on installations
in large venues, we expect that there will be growing
opportunities for these players and others in smaller
venues, campuses and mixed use development
environments. These opportunities will be fueled by a
variety of factors including the increased need for network
densification, increased market competition, and the
growing use of unlicensed spectrum technologies for local
mobile services.
Exhibit 3: An Illustration of the Nokia Flexi Small-Cell
Platform
Source: Tolaga Research 2016

In recent years, network equipment vendors like

Commscope, Corning/MobileAccess, JMA, Solid, and new
entrant players like Dali Wireless have been advancing their
DAS solutions. These advancements have been primarily
focused towards reducing the cost and complexity of front-
haul architectures and improving the efficiencies of remote
radio resources. Commscope has acquired a variety of
radio frequency cabling, component and antenna
companies to become a dominant player for ancillary radio
equipment. Commscope expanded its DAS infrastructure
portfolio with the acquisition of TE Connectivity in January
2015. The TE Connectivity solution supports relatively
traditional active DAS architectures and uses a proprietary
front-haul connectivity protocol so that it requires less
bandwidth relative to conventional CPRI. Dali Wireless is a
start up company that has introduced a proprietary radio
routing solution, which uses digitalized routing techniques
for dynamically managing traffic demands amongst
distributed radio resources. Its solution is targeted primarily
towards DAS installations with ultra-high capacity demands.
Since the deployment scenarios for DAS are diverse, there
will be a continued need for a variety of DAS technology
architectures for the foreseeable future. In addition, while
there are strong operational drivers that favor DAS
architectures, the impact of these drivers will be diluted in
the future as small-cell architectures evolve and mobile
service providers increasingly embrace operational
automation. As this occurs, we believe that it will become
increasingly difficult to distinguish between DAS and small-
cells, and that the industry will require new taxonomies that
distinguish between use-cases rather than technologies.

Operationalizing Mass-Market Small-Cells and DAS

The most common justification for the lack-luster market
adoption of small-cells, and to some extent DAS, is the
challenges in site acquisition and in provisioning back-
haul/font-haul transmission resources. While these two
areas are challenging for small-cell implementations, we
believe that until the mobile industry transitions from
deployment and operational strategies designed for
macro-cells, small-cell and DAS adoption will continue
to languish in spite of efforts to resolve site acquisition
and back-haul challenges.
The general deployment and operational activities for radio
network equipment are summarized in Exhibit 4. These
functions are well defined for macro-cell deployments, and
are generally adopted for small-cells and DAS, largely
because they align with the operational work-flows,
organization structures and incentive plans that mobile
operators have in place.
Exhibit 4: General Deployment and Operational Activities
for Radio Network Equipment
Source: Tolaga Research 2016

Network Planning and Site Acquisition

A service provider’s network planning and site acquisition
activities are closely aligned, as is illustrated by the process
flow in Exhibit 5. Sophisticated network planning tools are
provided by specialist companies like Celplan, EDX
Wireless, Forsk, Infovista, Radplan and Siradel. While these
tools were originally developed primarily for macro-cell
network designs, features have been added to the platforms
to enable modeling for small-cell, DAS, Wi-Fi offload and
heterogeneous network architectures. However, we believe
that there are a variety of fundamental factors that hinder
network designers from capitalizing on these features.
Notable examples include the following:
Geographical Information System (GIS) data and
Critical Asset Mapping. Commonly, the data available
for planning small-cell and DAS systems is lacking. In
particular, high resolution three dimensional GIS data is
needed, as is the mapping of in-building environments.
The location and availability of space on suitable site
attachments and the proximity of these attachments
relative to transmission and electrical utility resources is
not readily available. Furthermore, even when this
information is available, network designers commonly
lack the necessary regulatory and commercial details to
reliably investigate the trade-offs between alternative
implementation strategies. Some companies are striving
to address these challenges. For example, Nokia in
conjunction with SAC Wireless (which it acquired in
August 2014) have developed a “HetNet Engine Room”,
which includes catalogs of site candidates that have the
necessary features for small-cell deployments. The
Hetnet Engine Room also includes modeling
functionality for conducting total cost of ownership
(TCO) and trade-off assessments amongst alternative
deployment strategies.

Incremental radio network design philosophies. The

flow chart shown in Exhibit 5 illustrates the incremental
approach that is typically adopted by network designers.
This approach tends to favor macro-cell
implementations, since they are normally deployed on
an individual site-by-site basis and have well
understood characteristics relative to existing network
environments. In contrast, small-cells cannot be
economically deployed on an individual basis, but rather
need to be deployed in clusters. Commonly the small-
cell clusters exceed the incremental network design
demands and require strategic assessments that
depend on broader network deployment objectives. In
the case of DAS systems, the planning process typically
favors large venues that are not well supported by
existing macro-cells, and high profile locations that
warrant specific attention during the network planning
process.

There is clearly a need for mobile operators to carefully

plan and coordinate their network deployment and
integration strategies. However, we believe that
because of the localized coverage footprints for small-
cells and DAS, the level of control needed for network
planning purposes is greatly reduced relative to that for
macro-cells.

Organizational structures, roles and responsibilities

and operational models. Naturally the operational
models that mobile operators have established for
network planning and site acquisition are designed
primarily for macro-cells. As a result, emphasis is
 placed on the role of network planning in driving site
deployments, rather than vice-versa. In addition, the
operational models incorporate many activities that
need to automated for small-cells and DAS solutions to
be deployed economically at scale.

Exhibit 5: Network Planning and Site Acquisition

Operational Work-flow
Source: Tolaga Research 2016
Rather than maintaining highly centralized and controlled
network planning and site acquisition activities, we believe
that mobile operators must evolve towards decentralized
planning strategies, akin to those adopted for femto-cell
deployments. With current planning processes, many
venues, office buildings and apartment blocks lack coverage
even when the radio infrastructure costs are covered.
Mobile operators have limited resources and therefore must
prioritize their efforts, often to the detriment of viable small-
cell and DAS deployment opportunities. With a
decentralized approach, mobile operators could allow
certified third parties or enterprise IT employees to
install the radio equipment. Self optimizing network
(SON) provisioning and configuration management
techniques could be used to configure the equipment and to
update inventory databases, such as those used for
network planning tools. Performance measurement data
could also be used to verify and certify installations, and
quarantine mechanisms instituted to ensure poor
installations do not adversely impacted new deployments.
Acquiring small-cell sites in outdoor environments and
public areas has proven challenging and costly for mobile
operators. Commonly the most suitable sites, (such as
street poles and traffic lights) are managed by
municipalities, who are notoriously slow in availing site
resources and often hindered by protracted approval
processes. These processes can be further complicated by
regulatory approvals, such as rights-of-way for fiber back-
haul. Given these complexities, and the centralized
approach that mobile operators are taking to small-cell
planning and site acquisition, only the most strategic sites
are acquired. While regulators such as the FCC in the
United States aim to introduce regulations to ease site
acquisition challenges, we do not believe these efforts will
be sufficient to drive mass market small-cell adoption.
Currently there is no silver bullet to address the challenges
in acquiring sites for outdoor small-cells, particularly with
current network planning techniques. However, we believe
that efforts to address these challenges are more likely to
succeed with decentralized network planning. For example,
with decentralized planning, operators could pursue
strategies to crowd-source sites from urban retailers and
small businesses. In many cases, small businesses are
located in urban canyons where small-cell capacity is
needed. For this approach to be effective, the small-cells
would need to be designed for plug and play deployment,
possibly even including steerable antenna equipment.
Depending on the implementation, small-cells might use
one of a variety of backhaul techniques, including point-to-
point, point-to-multi-point or mesh wireless or basic
broadband access.

It is likely that with the right operational models, mobile

operators will also find compelling and scalable
opportunities with companies that provide urban services,
such as billboard advertising and garbage collection and
possibly transportation services.

If small-cell sites can be crowd-sourced in sufficiently large

numbers, mobile operators might be able to introduce fail-
over techniques and only partially provision the small-cell
sites depending on traffic demands and the relative
performance of the individual sites.

Architectural Engineering, Civil Works and Engineering

Furnish and Install (EF&I)
Architectural engineering, civil works and EF&I
(engineering, furnish and install) activities represent a
significant proportion of the overall cost for base station
deployments. Small-cell equipment providers have made
tremendous progress in eliminating EF&I costs by
simplifying small-cell form-factors to essentially reflect that
of Wi-Fi access points. This is particularly the case when
small-cells are deployed on standardized fixtures, such as
street poles, bus shelters and traffic lights. For example, is
Ericsson’s Zero-Site, which is integrated directly into energy
efficient street lights. In addition to units with standardized
form-factors, we believe that there will be a growing need
for modular architectures so that small-cells can be
embedded in other items at the time of manufacture.
Furthermore, with network densification, smaller base
station form-factors will be needed. A notable example, is a
prototype small-cell base station that Qualcomm integrated
in a USB module.
The engineering, civil works and EF&I costs and
complexities for DAS can be significant, particularly for
deployments in large venues. In some cases, the DAS
infrastructure is deployed with neutral host architectures to
defray costs amongst multiple mobile operators and to
eliminate the need for parallel radio infrastructure. DAS
architectures can vary greatly amongst implementations
and can include both passive and active RF signal
distribution technology, and in an increasing number of
cases are complemented with overlaid small-cell
equipment. Exhibit 1a illustrates a traditional DAS
implementation that hosts three mobile operators with active
radio distribution that leverages fiber or copper twisted pair
(front-haul) technology. Companies like CommScope,
Corning/MobileAccess, JMA, and Solid provide front-haul
solutions. Depending on the size of the installation, the
front-haul implementation of a DAS can cost between
several hundred thousand and several million US Dollars.
While dedicated front-haul cabling is required for CPRI or
CPRI-like interfaces, dedicated cabling is also
commonplace for Ethernet based DAS systems. In some
cases this is a consequence of the positioning of the remote
antennas, but more commonly enterprises have a policy to
separate telecom services from their own IT infrastructure.
However we anticipate that if enterprise IT departments are
given greater autonomy in the design and implementation of
the small-cell and DAS infrastructure, they are more likely to
leverage existing IT cabling for front-haul connectivity in
cases where Ethernet can be used.

Configuration and Optimization

Today it is usual for small-cell configuration and optimization
parameters to be calibrated using SON automation tools. In
most cases this is delivered using Distributed SON (D-SON)
solutions, provided by the equipment vendors. However, to
enable the decentralized network planning and site
acquisition processes that are proposed in this report, we
believe that it will be necessary to implement Centralized
SON (C-SON) solutions, and tight integration between
inventory management, planning and optimization functions.
C-SON provides the necessary functionality to ensure that
ad hoc small-cell and DAS deployments don’t negatively
impact overall network performance.

Back-haul/Front-haul and Core Network Integration

Backhaul/front-haul and core network integration has and
continues to be a major challenge for small-cell and DAS
implementations. This is particularly the case for outdoor
DAS (o-DAS) where fiber front-haul is required. While
technically fiber is an ideal transmission solution, it is not
viable for most small-cell/o-DAS deployments. This is
clearly illustrated by the average cost of Crown Castle’s o-
DAS deployment, which typically exceeds USD100,000 per
radio node. While CPRI and CPRI-like implementations
benefit operators by supporting centralized base station
equipment, we believe it will be superseded with capabilities
being developed by Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia to
distribute the base band functionality between central
controllers and remote radio heads. With this approach,
front-haul connectivity can be deployed over Ethernet
connections with standard microwave radio transmission.
While this will result in proprietary front-haul
implementations, it will dramatically reduce the transmission
demands required for small-cell and DAS systems.
In addition to reducing front-haul bandwidth and latency
demands, we believe that it will be necessary for operators
to leverage a wider range of transmission solutions to
enable the adhoc site acquisition strategies discussed in
this report. Notable examples include, the use of local fixed
broadband access networks, point-to-point and multi-point
microwave, mesh networking and millimeter wave
technologies. To avoid excessive small-cell and DAS
infrastructure SKUs, we anticipated continued efforts to
enable modular architectures, to ease the deployment
challenges when varied transmission solutions are needed.

Conclusion
Even though small-cells and DAS have been fueled by
tremendous hype and expectation, they have only seen
modest adoption. Industry pundits commonly blame the
lack-luster performance of small-cells and DAS on back-
haul and site acquisition challenges. However, we believe
that the cause is more systemic, and attributable to
processes and procedures of mobile operators, which
continue to be essentially designed for macro-cell networks.
Until operators are successful in transforming their
processes and procedures, we believe that small-cells and
DAS will continue to languish. In particular, we believe that it
is important that operators modify their network planning
and optimization activities from current approaches which
are highly centralized, to those that allow planning to
become increasingly decentralized and adhoc. We believe
that by changing network planning in this regard, venue
owners, enterprises and business owners will become
empowered and vested in the successful deployment of
small-cells and DAS equipment. This change is not trivial
and requires increased operational automation with
techniques like C-SON to ensure that overall network
performance is maintained. It also requires standardized
and modular small-cell and DAS infrastructure form-factors
and technology changes to enable greater diversity in terms
of the back-haul and front-haul transmission solutions that
can be used.
While the operational changes proposed in this report are
challenging, we believe that they are necessary, particularly
as market demands drive the need for network densification
with mass market deployments of small-cell and DAS
infrastructure.
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