Nokia sees 1000x more bandwidth for 'Beyond 4G'

There is room for a ten-fold increase in mobile broadband subscribers and possibly up to 100 times higher traffic per user (more than 1 GByte/sub/day), with smartphones and super-phones experiencing the fastest growth, says Harri Holma, a Fellow at Nokia Siemens Networks.
Networks need to be prepared to cope with this total mobile broadband traffic, which could rise a thousand-fold by 2020, but this can only happen with industry collaboration. These ‘Beyond 4G’ networks must deliver low cost per bit, be highly scalable and able to adapt to “fluid” demand from users at different times of the day and at different locations. Network performance must be hugely better in terms of coverage, reliability, quality of connection, speed of response and energy efficiency.
Meeting these challenges will take considerable global research and development “Beyond 4G” over the next decade, with consolidated efforts from all players in the ecosystem – standardization bodies and the industry at large – to develop the required innovative technologies and deployment options. As well as evolving existing technologies, research must also identify technology leaps.
There are three key goals to be met:

• Ten times more spectrum will need to become available for mobile broadband
• Networks will need to use spectrum ten times more efficiently than existing mobile broadband technologies
• Networks will need ten times more base stations

These goals could be met through a concerted action by operators, vendors and standardization bodies, he says, pointing out that NSN is already introducing new architectures, such as Liquid Radio including baseband pooling, active antenna systems and unified heterogeneous networks, to deliver the necessary technological developments.
There is a white paper at 2020: Beyond 4G: Radio Evolution for the Gigabit Experience

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