The global number of small cells is now larger...

is 5,925,974, Informa said. While most of the deployed small cells are residential femtocells, they also include enterprise and public-access small cells, Informa said. Small cells were able to overtake mobile base stations because mature femtocell deployments have begun to scale, Informa said, saying Sprint Nextel has deployed 1 million femtocells, up from 250,000 in 2011. Small Cell as a Service (SCaaS) has also emerged as a way for third parties to deploy a small-cell network and rent it out to multiple operators. Virgin Media is set to deploy SCaaS in the U.K., while Colt Telecom has already said it’s trialing SCaaS with a major European operator, Informa said. Others, including Europe’s Cloudberry Mobile and the U.S.’s ClearSky are also planning to offer SCaaS, Informa said. “Without this change, the mobile network simply could not sustain the continued growth in data usage,” Informa principal analyst Dimitris Mavrakis said in a news release. “Such a dramatic network transformation opens up interesting new models and over the past quarter the Small Cell as a Service idea has been gaining traction. … At the moment, this is being targeted at major operators that are looking for a simple route to establishing a small-cell network as well as smaller players that have found the barriers to entry too high to date” (http://xrl.us/bnw8mt).