People who have spotty cell phone service may have cause to celebrate. Small cellular base stations, both femtocells and picocells, are expected to grow to sales of 70 million by 2017, astudy by Mobile Experts says.
That makes a compound annual growth rate of 200 percent.
“Mobile operators now have experience with residential femtocells,” said Joe Madden, principal analyst for Mobile Experts. “They are getting ready to extend this experience into enterprise and high-capacity scenarios. We have talked with more than 30 mobile operators, as well as chipset and backhaul vendors to determine how quickly this market can grow. In short, explosive growth is coming.”
Femtocells (News - Alert) and picocells are devices that are intended to improve wireless connectivity. Femtocells are generally intended for households and plug into a broadband Internet connection, such as a DSL or cable modem. These devices take advantage of the GSM standard’s ability to use smaller cells than the standard powerful towers.
NEC (News 
- Alert) has just launched a new LTE base station intended to be installed in areas with limited space.
Picocells are installed in commercial areas and increase connectivity in places where a lot of people are using mobile devices, such as stadiums and subway stations.
Both of these types of devices should help mobile carriers who find themselves overwhelmed by the popularity of their own products, especially data-hungry smartphones. Picocells and femtocells also extend coverage inside buildings, where the materials may make cellular signals from conventional cell towers difficult to penetrate.
“Rising demand for mobile data has already driven some networks to their capacity limits during the peak hours of the day. Adding more spectrum and 4G spectral efficiency will help. Adding Wi-Fi will help. But mobile operators anticipate that these steps won’t be enough … and small cells are the answer. Femtocells, picocells, and some kinds of DAS systems will be useful tools to address increasing data density,” Madden said.
The report, titled Small Cells and HetNets: Femtocells, Picocells, DAS, Repeaters, Relays and Wi-Fi, covers microcells, picocells, femtocells, “metro femtocells” or “metrocells,” indoor and outdoor distributed antenna systems (I-DAS and O-DAS), repeaters sold to consumers and carriers, and integration with Wi-Fi.
The report also includes a breakdown of the small cell market forecast by region, interface, multimode and single mode, frequency band, power levels, and small cells vs. DAS in North America.
David Delony is a Bay Area expatriate living in Ashland, Oregon. He combines his lifelong love of both words and technology in his career as a freelance writer. David holds a B.A. in communication from California State University, East Bay.Edited by
Rich Steeves
