Ahead of our North America Plenary next week, CEO Sue Monahan shares insight into the discussions and debates members can expect. Registration is essential.
Only a few days until the last Small Cell Forum gathering of the year, our North American plenary meeting, which will be held on December 6-7 in conjunction with the SCWS Americas conference in San Jose, in the heart of Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley is an appropriate venue, as the hub of development of digital platforms for enterprises and consumers. Among the key themes of the conference, and the plenary discussions, will be ways to enhance the value proposition for small cells, but making them easier to deploy and able to support a wide range of services in cities, enterprises and public spaces.
As members, this is your chance to shape the priorities and work program for 2018 by taking part in an intense two days of discussions, debates and planning. You will get detailed updates on critical areas of SCF work, including the outcomes of the ground-breaking summits in Atlanta and Mumbai, and exclusive results of operator and enterprise research commissioned by the Forum. And of course, you will get many opportunities to have your say, and make sure your organization’s views are represented in the planning for 2018.
The full agenda can be found via the member site but here are a few highlights to whet your appetite.
We expect to make significant progress on the Enterprise program, with plenty of inputs from the Enterprise Advisory Council to help formulate a detailed overview of requirements, and to start to discuss how the Forum can help address those in order to simplify and accelerate small cell deployment in many vertical sectors.
Related to that effort, smart buildings are moving rapidly up the agenda, and the Forum is delighted to announce a joint session with one of its key partner organizations, the TIA, focused on this topic. Building on an alliance forged at the Partners’ Day in Atlanta in the summer, this full-afternoon session will aim to agree a joint certification program for deployment in different types of buildings.
Also springing from the Partners’ Day, there will be discussion of how to extend co-operations with various other parties including the CBRS Alliance and ETSI’s MEC group.
Each SCF Working Group will have its own packed agenda and, building on a pattern set in this year’s events in Cannes and Atlanta, there will be an increased level of cross-working group discussion to ensure that all the activities are coordinated and incorporate as many inputs as possible. For instance, the Marketing and Biz groups will hold a joint session to discuss recent research commissioned from operators and enterprises.
And a packed session shared between BIZ, TECH and OPS will focus on an issue which is proving critical to opening the way for more enterprise and city deployments – sharing of spectrum and infrastructure to support new services and multi-operator models.
These are just a few of the topics – other highlights will include an overview of xHaul (backhaul, fronthaul and midhaul) options, of the latest in virtualization, and of regulatory updates.
The result will be two days of lively and high value discussions, and a clear schedule of work items and priorities for 2018. Make sure you help to define that list, and we look forward to seeing you in San Jose.
