Amdocs Survey: Small Cell Sites to Proliferate

Amdocs, the leading provider of customer experience systems and services, today released the findings of a survey that highlights the challenge facing service providers’ network planning and logistics departments as they seek to meet a more than 20-fold increase in data demand during the next five years. According to the study, conducted by Rethink Technology Research, service providers are planning to deploy millions of small cells^* to increase network capacity. This move is critical to service providers’ ability to handle increases in 3G demand and to deliver on 4G promises, both of which will vastly increase the burden on planning and logistic departments. The survey found that 59 percent of service providers expect to deploy at least 10 times more small cells by 2017 than in 2011, yet almost half of network planners (47 percent) say a lack of network planning resources is the biggest challenge facing them today, leading to rollout delays.