The cellular industry seems to be buzzing with “small cell” fever. Within the general thrust of implementing small cell outdoor cellular networks, backhaul is seen as one of the major barriers to deployment. The market for equipment used to provide backhaul to these sites can be generally evaluated by the number of micro-cellular base stations that are forecasted, along with an assessment of whether they’d be backhauled using various, more likely backhaul technologies (i.e. fiber or wireless). Figure 1shows the result of one industry forecast focused on the micro-cellular market.
