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This article is part of: Executive Briefing Service, Private Networks
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Neutral host networks play an essential and growing role in ensuring indoor coverage of mobile networks. This report examines the evolving business models and technology of this market, and how it relates to private mobile networks.
Why neutral host matters now
STL Partners’ vision of the successful telecoms business of the future imagines the network becoming more flexible and easier to consume, through technological advancement in things like network automation and application programmable interfaces (APIs), allowing it to become a platform for innovation and new services — whether built by telcos or other parties. But this vision depends on a basic prerequisite: reliable and seamless universal coverage.
If users cannot depend on the network, they cannot build critical services on top of it. Eliminating not-spots and shaky performance areas is therefore not only an engineering challenge but a strategic imperative. Indoor coverage is one of the most persistent barriers to achieving this.
Neutral host solutions are a practical route to improving coverage and capacity where it matters most: inside buildings, across dense urban sites and within complex indoor/outdoor hybrid venues such as stadiums and transport hubs.
The neutral host market also matters to many interested parties because it is growing, offering opportunity. Estimates vary depending on how the market is defined but all published quantitative analyses of the neutral host/indoor coverage market forecast a CAGR of between 10% and 19% globally over the next five years.
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What do we mean by neutral host?
The term “neutral host” can be used broadly. In a pedantic sense, independent tower companies are neutral hosts when they own passive infrastructure used by multiple mobile operators. However, this report uses a narrower and more practical definition, related to the commonly accepted notion of this market:
Neutral host refers to shared infrastructure deployed to improve mobile coverage and capacity in challenged environments, typically indoors, and made available to multiple mobile network operators (MNOs) by a neutral third party. See figure below.
Ownership models for indoor coverage
Source: STL Partners
Table of contents
- Executive Summary
- Introduction
- How mobile private networks and neutral host overlap
- How will the relationship evolve?
- Neutral host technology trends
- Will small cells replace DAS?
- Neutral host business models: Who pays and why?
- Conclusion
- Advice for telcos
- Advice for neutral host providers
- Advice for small cell vendors and private network vendors
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- Private networks manifesto
