Samsung debuted its new small cell portfolio today, with products that leverage a variety of spectrum bands, including licensed LTE, Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), and Licensed Assisted Access (LAA), along with WiFi.
The new offerings, which serve home, business, and outdoor environments, are being showcased at Mobile World Congress Americas 2017 in San Francisco this week.
Supporting up to two CBRS carriers, Samsung’s CBRS products will enter field trials with tier-one U.S. operators in the fourth quarter of 2017, with the offerings expected to be commercially available at that time.
The CBRS portfolio also includes support for WiFi and integrated cellular IoT (CAT-M1) technologies, which Samsung indicated will enhance smart homes, as well as indoor and outdoor wireless networks in businesses or public venues.
“Our small cell portfolio provides operators and enterprises with new options to address their increasing mobile connectivity needs,” Imran Akbar, vice president and general manager of wireless enterprise at Samsung Electronics America, noted. “As demonstrated by our membership to prominent industry organizations, such as the Small Cell Forum, CBRS Alliance, and MulteFire Alliance, as well as our small cell expertise, Samsung is committed to innovating cost-effective small cell solutions using LTE technology.”
Samsung’s LAA small cell, meanwhile, allows the combination of a licensed LTE carrier with two unlicensed LTE carrier to increase capacity and speeds indoors. The company said it anticipates trials for its LAA small cell to happen in early 2018.
Back in June, ABI Research indicated the market for hardware related to unlicensed and shared spectrum technologies is expected to reach $1.7 billion as deployments ramp up over the next five years.
SNS Research, meanwhile, forecast carrier spending on deployments of small cells, centralized RAN (C-RAN), distributed antenna systems (DAS), and WiFi will hit $15 billion by the end of this year.
In March, IHS Markit reported small cell shipments were already up 43 percent in 2016.
The new products are the latest development from Samsung, which has been heavily involved in the development and deployment of small cell technologies for densification, and recently performed interoperability testing with Federated Wireless Spectrum Controller.
“Samsung is a market leader in the small cell space, and this announcement sends a strong signal to the market about the important role of CBRS shared spectrum platforms will play in wireless deployments moving forward,” Federated Wireless CEO Iyad Tarazi commented. “The opportunity that feeing 150 MHz of shared spectrum opens up for operators and enterprises cannot be overstated, and Samsung offers customers the ability to take advantage of this opportunity with their new portfolio.”
At MWC Americas, Samsung said it will highlight CBRS’ potential with a demonstration of 20 MHz carrier in the 3.5 GHz band. The demo will show a delay and interruption-free HD video stream, made possible by the CBRS small cell, Samsung’s next generation core, along with modified Samsung Galaxy S8+ smartphones.
