Partner content: Sachin Karkala, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the RAN business unit at Mavenir, talks to Annie Turner about how and why small cells are playing a much larger role in seamless connectivity
Small cells are set to play a big role in public, private and neutral host networks: the Small Cell Forum predicts 61 million small cell units would be shipped by 2030 – a compound annual growth rate of 9.4%
In this interview with Mobile Europe, Sachin Karkala, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the RAN business unit at Mavenir (www.mavenir.com), talks about the drivers for the growth. He highlights the rise of data-hungry applications and how macro networks struggle to provide the necessary coverage, capacity and customer experience indoors and in densely populated public areas, such as stadia.
Karkala says Mavenir is particularly focused on how it can deliver value where indoor and outdoor environments converge.
He cites diverse case studies in very different markets – enterprise Distributed Antenna System (DAS) deployments in Australia and urban rollouts with Switzerland’s Sunrise and at Three UK for network densification. Despite the differences in the use cases and markets, Karkala explains they have common requirements and outlines what they are.
As we move towards 6G – standardisation is underway and commercial deployments are slated for 2030 onwards – Karkala says even more data-heavy use cases will depend on highly stable and resilient networks, which can be achieved by combining macro and small cells, and AI.
Already AI enables zero-touch provisioning and maintenance to transform Mavenir’s small cell deployments and accelerate ROI to within months via what the company calls Network Intelligence-as-a-Service.
In summary, the small cell space is key to future networks, with AI playing a role in every aspect of Mavenir’s development, deployment and maintenance of solutions.
To learn more about Mavenir, visit www.mavenir.com
