Market Challenges And Opportunities

Factors driving growth of the global HetNet infrastructure market:

Service providers are facing high pressure from consumers to deliver good quality networks at affordable prices. Unlike earlier, mobile network market is currently driven by customers. The consumer base of service providing companies are diverse, which includes densely populated metro areas, less populated rural areas, metro stations, shopping malls, and other places. In the metro area, people require both personal service such as Wi-Fi for home and business services such as network for company, and a small number of people in rural area mostly require personal services. Installing homogeneous networks in both urban and rural areas is not a suitable solution for service providing companies. HetNet could address this problem by providing continuous network coverage to diversified consumers.

In order to tackle this situation, service providing companies are continuously investing in heterogeneous network infrastructure by deploying small cells, Wi-Fi networks, and distributed antenna systems (DAS). This will help the companies to manage increasing coverage and capacity requirement. For instance, in February 2017, Airspan Networks Inc. entered into a strategic partnership with Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited, an India-based telecommunication company. Through this partnership, Airspan could deploy small cell network across India to provide high speed internet, voice, and digital services.

Furthermore, key players are adopting new technologies such as centralized RAN (C-RAN) architecture, which has centralized functionality and can be shared across a large number of distributed radio nodes. When compared to traditional base stations, C-RAN improves network quality at low cost. Thus, increasing consumer demand for improved signal quality and increasing investment by service providing companies are expected to drive growth of the global HetNet infrastructure market over the forecast period.

However, factors such as high initial investment and maintenance cost, complex nature of power consumption, and others might hamper growth of the global HetNet infrastructure market over the forecast period.