Summary
There are several ways to expand the capacities of wireless networks. Ultimately broadband demand can only be met with a combination of fixed and wireless technologies at the access level.
Analysis
The laws of physics dictate that wireless access will never be able to provide the same capacity, expressed as Mbps/square km., as fixed access networks. It is misleading to use the analogy of customers giving up their landlines for mobile service only as a forerunner of what will happen with mobile broadband. Even where mobile broadband subscriptions substantially exceed the number of fixed broadband customers, in terms of traffic volumes fixed access will have to be more important if growing broadband demands are to be met. Nevertheless there will be substantial increases in radio access networks' capacities thanks to new architectures and perhaps eventually to new methods of spectrum management enabled by the "holy grail" of cognitive radio. Among examples of these new architectures cited by Qualcomm are denser networks with femto- and pico-cells. Significant traffic offloading from macrocells is possible given the amount of mobile data traffic that is originated and terminated indoors. One interesting consequence within this context is that unpaired or TDD spectrum, which has largely been neglected in the 3G era may become more valuable and important. Indoor femto- and pico-cells based on TDD LTE (which is being very actively developed in the interests of the largest (by subscriber number) operator China Mobile) can be combined with macrocell FDD deployments in such a way as to mitigate the risks of interference management between TDD and FDD systems. A side effect of this development if it occurs is that it will put an end to the misconception that WiMAX has a special role to play in TDD spectrum. An operator pursuing this network scenario would want to use the same technology - LTE - in its macrocells as in its femto- and pico-cells.
This author consults with leading institutions through GLG
Analyses are solely the work of the authors and have not been edited or endorsed by GLG.
