Over the past five years, the adoption of small cells has increased dramatically. At Mobile World Congress (MWC) this year the Small Cell Forum announced that we have now crossed the threshold where there are more small cells deployed than macro cells in the world. Clearly, small cells are playing, and will continue to play a critical role in the global mobile infrastructure.

Over the last 18 months Cisco has doubled-down on its investments in small cells, from dramatic growth and scaling of our Service Provider Wi-Fi solution to our recently announced intent to acquire licensed small cell leader Ubiquisys.  With this opportunity, Cisco has a responsibility to address the challenges we face in small cell deployments. How do we help mobile and cable operators around the world address the issue of cost effective coverage and capacity using small cells?  How do we work with the small cell ecosystem, including mobile partners and thought leaders in this industry, to create successful, and profitable, deployments of small cells by operators around the world? How do we work with enterprise organizations to deploy small cells?

To help accelerate the dialogue, Cisco hosted conversations with industry experts who understand the challenges that small cells bring and who are working to find the solutions. In Big Thinkers in Small Cells, we have brought together mobile visionaries from the industry, including  Paul Jacobs, CEO at Qualcomm, Jim Peters, CTO at SITA , and Gabriel Brown, Senior Analyst at Heavy Reading, along with Cisco thought leaders, to discuss these pain points, and really drive a conversation around how small cells are both an architectural and business solution to explosive mobile data growth. These thinkers are the developers, creators, designers, and leaders who are making small cells come to life.  To each of us, small cells are a very personal solution; you will see the passion and excitement within each of their conversations because they not only want to solve these issues for operators but for themselves as day-to-day mobile users.

We will be having a 6 week blog series here on the SP 360 blog, where each of our Cisco Big Thinkers will dive deeper into small cell topics such as Monetization Opportunities, Bringing Licensed and Unlicensed Technologies together, Self Organizing Networks, the Value of the Network and more. Click on the 'Visionary Views' video to learn more about where these thought leaders see the future of mobility ten, fifteen and twenty years from now. And with that, we would like to introduce: Big Thinkers in Small Cells.