European small cells: towerco deployment plans
There’s no doubt that towercos are beginning to position themselves as the neutral host/infrastructure provider of the future. Whether they’re working towards a clear vision for that goal, or still trying to balance investment vs return in a complex market, there’s no doubt that discussions at this year’s TowerXchange Meetup Europe will be heavily focussed on future networks.
Over the last few months TowerXchange has spoken to three of the most active towercos in this space, to find out the scope of their planned investment in future networks.
Cellnex:
At the close of 2017, Cellnex had 1,348 DAS and Small Cell nodes across their five markets. Oscar Pallarols, Director of Innovation and Product Strategy at Cellnex, told us:
We acquired Commscon 18 months ago [and] we recently leveraged their expertise to deploy a DAS network in the Atletico de Madrid Stadium as a neutral host. The acquisition of Alticom in The Netherlands brought us broadcasting as well as telecom services provisioned from high towers, but the reason we liked the asset was because their know how on data centre location as well as edge computing as this will play a critical role in keeping latencies lower in 5G infrastructure. Thus, storage and computation will move closer to end-users to enable new services and applications that will live and grow within the 5G ecosystem.
We have other work streams in the pre stages, plus innovation and research activities. One example would the “5GCity” project, a 2020 Horizon Programme project funded by the EU.
INWIT:
Oscar Cicchetti, CEO of INWIT, says:
We now offer two services: coverage as a multi-operator neutral host and single operator solutions.
We have included 4,000 small cells in our plans to the end of 2018. This number for this stage of deployment is relevant but is in line with the market’s needs. Just a couple of years ago MNOs were planning hundreds, not thousands, of small cells but now the demand is taking off and we see in this a potential exponential growth.
Our goal is to become the neutral host of choice by quickly reaching an appropriate scale through agreement with the owners of the most relevant locations and in tune with the plans of our customers.
Wireless Infrastructure Group:
Scott Coates, CEO, Wireless Infrastructure Group, spoke about their fibre connected rollout in Aberdeen, where they expect to spend ￡10m on the project with O2:
WIG has constructed a fibre connected network of multi operator small cell nodes. It’s a contiguous network across the city centre and also passes high footfall areas around the central railway station, university and football stadium. WIG designed and constructed the network and deployed multiple fibres to each node which all connect back to a central hub. Telefonica are the first MNO to launch on our network and are utilising C-RAN architecture which is a first in the UK market. We are delighted with the performance of the network and we plan to expand it.
More generally, we see some small cells being deployed using wireless backhaul but we are focused on creating long-term infrastructure that can support C-RAN and other fibre-hungry architectures. Supporting more processing at the edge of the network is key to lowering latency and using network resources more efficiently. It is interesting to see towercos announcing plans for mini data centres on tower sites, further addressing this need for local processing capability.
To find out more about how these towercos and many more, including Arqiva, Russian Towers, First Tower Company, Global Tower, Cignal, Axion, TDF and mobile network operators such as Three, Telefonica, Vodafone, Orange, Sunrise, STC, Teliasonera, EE and BT plan to roll out their 5G and future network infrastructure, make sure you’re registered for TowerXchange Meetup Europe, taking place at the Business Design Centre in London on April 17-18th.