OYSTER BAY, NY -- Small cell equipment, including units designated for public venues like shopping malls, are expected to grow 67% compounded annually to $3.1 billion in 2018, new research indicates.

The public venue small cell category is a subset of the existing enterprise small cell segment, and will make up half the segment sales by revenue by 2018.

“With the rapid growth in mobile traffic and data demand shifting to low mobility locations — the majority of them indoors — mobile operators are closing the gap between capacity and demand with solutions ranging from the traditional active and passive distributed antenna systems to carrier Wi-Fi, and this emerging category of public venue small cells,” according to Nick Marshall, principal analyst, mobile networks at ABI Research, which conducted the study.