On Thursday, startup SpiderCloud announced a resale deal with NEC, and Ubiquisys said it would demonstrate small cells with solid-state storage and Intel processors at the Small Cell World conference next week in London.

Small cells are fairly new to enterprises and public spaces, though the concept of deploying more radios closer to users took hold a few years ago with femtocells for homes with poor coverage. Closer in size to Wi-Fi access points than to traditional cellular base stations, they typically are installed on lamp posts or the sides of buildings. Small, distributed cells can provide more capacity to individuals by reusing the same spectrum a carrier already uses on traditional cell towers, as long as the two types of radios don't interfere with each other.

But some vendors are looking beyond those efficiency gains to other ways in which small cells could boost performance in local environments. There's more that carriers can do if they have cells deployed close to subscribers, those companies say.

SpiderCloud is focusing on enterprises with its SmartCloud system, which consists of Radio Node small cells and Services Node management units. The idea is for the Services Node to both help the Radio Nodes remain coordinated and link the cellular system to the enterprise's LAN and applications, said Ronny Haraldsvik, the company's chief marketing officer.

The SmartCloud system is designed as an alternative to distributed antenna systems, the most common mechanism for boosting mobile performance in an office.