Asia-Pacific is on track to account for nearly 70% of global small cell deployments for the years of 2017 and 2018, Rethink Research predicts.
The region is set to dominate deployments between now and 2020 due to its size, diversity and the technological lead taken by countries including South Korea, Japan and China, the research firm said.
In addition while small cell adoption in North America had been keeping track with deployments in APAC, by 2017 the early movers in the market will have completed the bulk of their rollouts.
But at the same time Chinese carriers will still be rapidly expanding their small cell footprints while major markets such as India and Indonesia will be starting to adopt the technology.
Rethink Research estimates that there will be around 1.2 million small cell deployments worldwide in 2020, with APAC accounting for the substantial majority of these.
From this year, the firm predicts that there will be significant growth in Africa's more densely populated areas. Deployments will also start to pick up in Europe from 2018.