Stephen Rayment, BelAir's CTO, told ConnectedPlanet that the trial is carrying live commercial traffic over 25 nodes within a dense cellular network, using a leading cableco's HFC for backhaul. The nodes are adding capacity, being placed among the macrocells rather than used as a spot coverage solution as is currently more usual for small cell technologies such as picocells, femtocells and DAS.

BelAir says it not only has a product that can be adapted for 3G capacity building now, but has experience of creating large outdoor networks using thousands of cells, even if those have, to date, been Wi-Fi ones. In particular, it has built Cablevision's and Time Warner Cable's large Wi-Fi outdoor networks, and is a supplier to AT&T's. The topology of outdoor small cell networks is similar to that of a Wi-Fi mesh network, Rayment argues. Small cells and Wi-Fi hotspots are usually at street level and need highly redundant backhaul.

According to Infonetics Research, 58% of operators plan to deploy small cells by the end of 2011 and a further 10% at a later date.

    

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