Gordon Mansfield

Small Cell Forum

My name is Gordon Mansfield, and I currently serve as the elected chairman of the Small Cell Forum. The Forum is an industry body that promotes and drives the wide-scale adoption of small cell technologies to improve coverage, capacity and services delivered by mobile networks. I have many years of experience in the space, having previously served on the Femto Forum board from 2008-2010 and having led a tier one operators small cell effort since 2007. I consider it a great honor to be asked to write the foreword for this very informative book on small cells and heterogeneous networks. The authors are all highly respected researchers in academia and in industry, who have spent years working on the topics covered.

In recent years, small cells have become a very big topic when discussing mobile Internet and the tremendous data growth experienced over the past five years by operators around the globe. When we look at the recent history of data growth, some operators have experienced a 20,000 percent growth in data from 2007-2011. Combine that with the incredible forecast coming from all parts of the industry suggesting 10X and higher growth over the next four to five years, and it becomes clear that new ways to serve this data growth are necessary. We cannot continue to rely on new spectrum and advances in the air interface alone to sustain these types of data growth.