The last piece of the power challenges, said Craft, is the rising cost of energy. 1% of the time the AC system is down and when the system is not available, that equates to a tremendous amount in cost, but also the loss of critical functions during things like storms when a phone is needed,” said Craft. The traditional telecom network reliability is around five nines today or 99.999% reliable, while the AC network can only claim around three nines, or 99.9% reliability. “The only way to fix that,” he continued, “is to have a centralized system that has some level of backup that keeps the system available in the traditional telecom network.” “The AC grid is known to have outages every year,” commented Craft, adding that once in place, people will begin to rely on these small cell systems for critical communication, making such outages potentially disastrous.ĪC electrical feeds can be interrupted by a variety of anomalies from lightning strikes to blown transformers to rodent activity. Worse, though, is the fact that the traditional model of powering a cell site - in which the site is powered by the AC power grid, with a backup power source available as a fallback- cannot be applied to small cells, as these sites do not currently come with power backup, and therefore, would go down during a power outage. Therefore, as these deployments go from small to large scale, CommScope is encouraging operators to pay attention to power, both from a planning and consumption perspective, and to do so early.Ī typical three-sector small cell can require 200–1,000 watts of power, according to CommScope, and small cell networks must be incredibly dense to provide adequate coverage, meaning there will need to be a lot of individual installations, and each one will require power. “And we see that problem only growing as the number of small cells increases not just from a connection standpoint, but from an operational or maintenance standpoint.” “We’re seeing today that it already takes months for the utility to get out there to turn power up on each one of those poles,” Craft continued. Once the infrastructure design is in place and it is discovered that no electrical power exists nearby, approval to tap nearby buildings for power must be sought-a process that can take several months. According to the company, this timeline is a result of prioritizing coverage when designing new network sites, leaving power as an afterthought.
Power availability for small cellsĬommScope estimated in 2018 that the total time to deploy small cells is 18 to 24 months, due mostly to power constraints. is the “biggest challenge” facing small cell densification. In fact, Craft believes that getting enough power reliably and cost effectively to the “tens, if not hundreds of thousands” small cells that will be deployed across the U.S.
In the U.S., operators are expected to deploy five to 10 times more small cells than macro cells, and CTIA has forecasted that by 2026, more than 800,000 small cells will be deployed in the U.S., up from around 86,000 in 2018.įor Tom Craft, director of engineering, MetroCell Solutions at CommScope, this scale creates a problem: “Everything is focused on densification and getting services out to users, but when that densification increases by a factor of 10, so does the amount of power,” he said. Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)ĬommScope director of engineering: ‘When densification increases so does the amount of power’.Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window).Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window).