Shrinking Cells and Narrowing beams

In non-urban areas, that kind of demand for overall capacity won’t be so high, but individual demands for capacity will still be great. Deploying cell sites every 100 meters to cover bushes and trees is rather silly. In rural areas, Eriksson believes the answer is advanced adaptive beamforming, a method of using dual antennas to focus radio frequencies into a narrow beam, which can not only be aimed at a particular subscriber or device but track him or it as they move through the cell. Beam-forming is already in use in WiMax and other mobile networks. But if the technology is perfected, wireless networks could eventually create such precise beams that an entire cell sector of capacity could be directed at a particular user, Eriksson said. So instead of using a sector to blanket a cell with capacity shared by multiple users, the technique could be used to give multiple people a dedicated channel of capacity, Eriksson said.

If beam-forming is taken to its ultimate end, you can imagine it expanding beyond radio frequency spectrum into visible light, Eriksson said. Fiber optics would no longer be limited by the fiber. Rather an invisible beam of light—with wavelengths of dedicated capacity—could be directed at the mobile device.

Finally, Erikson predicts a merger of the wireless and wireline networks. We’re already seeing that convergence happening at the application and transport level, and we’ll start seeing it at the core level as we move to flat IP networks. The differences between the last-mile networks of wireless and wireline operators, however, are breaking down, Eriksson said. While they use different means of delivering their capacity—copper and fiber verses radio spectrum—the bandwidths and applications they deliver are becoming the same. And just as the wireless is industry is shrinking cells, the wireline industry is shrinking the length of the last mile, deploying remote terminals and fiber nodes closer to homes and businesses. At some point, the topographical needs and geographic location of base stations will start coinciding with those of central and remote offices, Eriksson said.

“The base station is becoming a big access aggregation point,” Eriksson said. “Why not build fiber to the base station and then extend fiber and copper to the home form there?” That would be the ultimate fixed-mobile convergence, he said, where the only difference between the wireline and wireless network is physical media over which information travels.