What drives the growth?
The continued growth in mobile data traffic is the main driver for this growth. In the Ericsson Mobility report (Nov 2016) [2], Ericsson predicts an increase of 10x the mobile data traffic by 2022 (see picture below). Which is equal to annual growth rate of 45%.
Video is the main driver for the growth and is expected to be 75% of the traffic by 2020 [2]. Small cells are needed to increase the densification of the mobile networks to support all this mobile data usage. Also, technology is getting to the point where the total cost of ownership (TCO) is allowing a business case for small cells for the operators. Looking at the backhaul mm-wave solutions, it is now possible to make fully integrated mm-wave circuits in silicon germanium (SiGe) and new technologies like WiGig is also supporting the TCO. WiGig supports TDD, beam steering and beam forming removing costly diplexers and parabolic antennas for some of the small cell backhaul use cases. As we often say: “Technology markets often takes longer than you think, but when it happens it is almost always bigger than you thought”.
Anders Storm
CEO
Sivers IMA – Your partner for advanced mm-wave and microwave solutions.
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Ref [1] https://technology.ihs.com/579786/research-note-outdoor-small-cell-backhaul-an-over-2-billion-market-by-2020
