In urban environments, the majority of new telecom sites are added through the construction of microsites, or by leveraging existing street furniture, often to deploy small cells rather than macro cells. While some towercos retain a focus on the green field macro network (and there’s nothing wrong with that – margins are proven), an increasing proportion of towercos are diversifying into alternate site typologies and adding new product lines to enable future heterogeneous networks. TowerXchange forecast tower companies deploying their first million of small cells and DAS between by 2019, but which tower companies have been the first movers?
Introduction
This article sets out to survey, and use anecdotal examples to illustrate, the adoption of small cells, DAS and other alternate site typologies in the heterogeneous network layer by tower companies worldwide.
