2.5M distributed antenna system nodes sold by 2017, says report

A new report suggests that the rapidly increasing popularity of mobile devices will lead to the purchase of 2.5 million Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS) over the next five years.

According to "Global DAS Market: DAS combined with Public Safety, WiFi, and Small Cells," the DAS landscape will greatly expand over the next few years. The report's author -principal analyst Joe Madden of Mobile Experts- predicts that there will be about 2.5 million DAS nodes shipped by the end of 2017.

"The DAS market will roughly double in size over the next five years,” analyst Madden predicted, “with a dramatic increase in the combination of DAS with Wi-Fi, public safety radio and LTE networks. In addition,” he opined, “when high-capacity small cells such as picocells are more widely available, we can expect small cells to replace macrocells as the primary signal source for indoor DAS systems."

Madden’s report also warns that DAS node providers are barely able to keep up with the demand for their products, especially given the rate the world is adopting wireless networks. (This is in line with the related demand for more bandwidth and the mobile backhauling techniques employed by operators to generate more capacity in an existing network.)

Subscribers were shown to prefer wireless networks that let them network multiple mobile devices to achieve better communications at their leisure. As more and more people embrace the use of mobile devices, laptops, and ultrabooks, the demand for faster, more capacious wireless networks –and the Distributed Antenna Systems that generate those networks- will only continue to grow until 2017, when the economic system is expected to hit its ceiling and demand tapers off.