monica.paolini posted on February 22, 2012 12:38
What will drive disruption in the wireless industry over the next three years? In a survey sponsored by Radisys, we posed this question to decision makers and thought leaders at mobile operators worldwide to get their personal insights. This is what we found:
New mobile devices. They will continue to have a disruptive effect both on usage models and on traffic loads. Subscribers will do more with their smartphones and tablets, and feature phone users will drive the next wave of adoption.
Voice over Long Term Evolution (VoLTE). Most operators are in no hurry to deploy it, but they do see it as an essential part of LTE. They do not need additional voice capacity, but they want to reduce their dependency on legacy networks.
Small cells in metrozones. Traffic growth makes small cells a must-have, but, to extract the cost and performance benefits they promise, operators agree that they have to manage interference with the macro layer, use self-organizing networks (SON), and find cost-effective backhaul solutions.
Wi-Fi offload. Already hugely valued, Wi-Fi offload will continue to be a main tool to increase capacity even after small cells are deployed. Increasingly, the value of Wi-Fi offload comes from residential locations, where a growing portion of the traffic comes from.
LTE Advanced. Carrier aggregation via LTE Advanced will bring increased spectrum efficiency – i.e., lower per-bit costs and higher capacity. It will take time before the technology is adopted, but operators look forward to its benefits. We found less excitement for higher-order MIMO and beamforming.
Frequency-division duplexing (FDD) / time-division duplex (TDD) LTE hybrid networks. Both FDD and TDD LTE will have a strong market presence, but it is too early to say how closely integrated they will be. TDD LTE allows FDD operators to deploy a small-cell underlay to increase capacity, without interference with the macro FDD layer.
The paper presenting the survey results is available here. You can also listen to a recorded webinar on the survey results here.
Posted in:
3G,
4G,
FDD,
LTE,
Mobile broadband,
Mobile devices,
TDD,
Wi-Fi,
Wireless broadband,
Wireless data,
Heterogeneous networks,
Small cells,
Core network,
RAN,
TD LTE,
Femto cells,
Wi-Fi offload,
SON,
Data traffic,
Wireless backhaul