While the sign says no loading, EE would probably rather these small cells were actually loaded. That’s a network pun for our readers.
In March 2022 EE announced it would be rolling out small cells in certain busy urban areas using its Street Hub 2.0 units. At that point it said it already had 200 cells deployed. By June 2023 EE said it had deployed 600 small cells. By the following November that number was 700, as it announced a tie-up with Boldyn to use that company’s infrastructure in and around the Kings Cross area.
This week the company said it now has 1,000 small cells on the ground, in a spread of UK towns and cities.
It also announced Ericsson as a small cell partner, although TMN understands the large majority of those 1,000 deployed small cells are Nokia units.
Finally, it said the first 5G small cells were being deployed in a busy retail area in Croydon, to the south of London. Croydon was one of the early areas to get the small cells, with 12 initially being deployed in 2022, and at that time a further 20 planned to go live.
While the 5G cells aggregate two bands (1800 MHz 4G with 3.5 GHz 5G) Nokia’s 4G cells are LAA compliant, meaning they can aggregate unlicensed 5 GHz band spectrum, commonly used for WiFi, along with EE’s 1800 MHz and additionally 2.6 GHz spectrum. Despite originally announcing use of LAA small cells in march 2022, EE said this week it is still the only carrier in Europe deploying small cells in this mode.
Croydon is one example of an area where BT has worked with a local council on planning and sites. It is also using its own existing assets to site cells, such as phone boxes.
Small cell market watchers are pretty firmly of the opinion that neutral host providers can make the business case for deploying small cells easier, by spreading the cost of permits and physicals, as well as backhaul etc, across multiple carriers. So as well as EE’s partnership with Boldyn, take note that this week Freshwave also just announced a deployment – including a pun that even TMN would balk at – with the carrier, adding that others would soon join.
Just on business models – EE said it had used its analytics tools to determine where to deploy the small cells. Although it didn’t share many further details it seems like its calculation is fairly simple – work out areas with high footfall of EE customers where the existing macro cells are already at full capacity, then analyse the possibility of using small cells to provide the coverage/capacity. If you can’t add more sectors or capacity, then up go the small cells.
