By Grant Lenahan Appledore Research Group attended Nokia analyst day that was held coincident with CTIA this year in Las Vegas, Sept 8th. The main topics were 5G, Small Cells and process improvements to improve their economics, and reserved comments about the Alcatel Lucent pending acquisition. 5G continues, in our opinion, to be relatively fuzzy compared to previous “G” releases. UMTS and LTE brought new modulation schemes, significant improvements n spectrum utilization, and consequently major improvements in both peak speed and more importantly, in ARG’s opinion, cost per MB delivered. But LTE essentially hit the theoretical Shannon limits, creating a challenge for further improvement. Yet the demand for more and more mobile broadband appears insatiable, and new forms of traffic are straining networks through the sheer number of connections and the density of traffic in certain public areas. Video on mobile RANs continues to grow, densely populated areas are experiencing spectrum exhaust (finally?), and IoT is placing new demands on networks – not so much for throughput and bandwidth, but for cost and for the number of simultaneous connected devices in a cell or region – heavy taxes on mobility management, registration, signaling and session management capabilities. These are the […]