The Facebook PR will get everyone noticing MU-MIMO. The top wireless engineers yawned. They have known for years that you could get extraordinary results from adding antennas and multiple streams. Bristol used 128 small antennas in about eight feet by four feet for a 12X efficiency gain. Facebook used 96 antennas (pictured) for what they considered a 10X gain. These are very early units. Better software and dedicated processors will take speeds higher; Facebook promises ~40% improvement. (Many details and excellent video below.)

20 MHz of spectrum could deliver a gigabit. Early LTE networks, like AT&T, get ~100 megabits. More recent LTE-A networks in Turkey, the Philippines, and many other countries use 60 MHZ and will get speeds well into the gigabits. 

An important caveat: MIMO works because the signals from each antenna can be separated by how they bounce off walls, etc. That means that the MIMO gain is much less  in some locations. Line of sight is best for today's systems but not ideal for MIMO. These are ideal figures; at the edge of a cell you get much less.

Arogyaswamo Paulraj invented MIMO in 1993. He predicted twenty years ago that you would one day be able to increase efficiency 100X.

IEEE is webcasting for free the year's best event April 21-22. Starting Wednesday April 13, New York will be the center of the wireless world. First, we have the CableLabs  INFORMED event on the 13th. http://5gwnews.com/index.php/90-r/423-u-s-cable-the-wireless-future-is-us  Two of the world's most respected wireless researchers - Gerhard Fettweis at TU Dresden and Ted Rappaport of NYU - highlight the event, along with top people from the FCC, CableLabs and most of the companies in the industry. It's the coming out day for cable as a major player in wireless, including 5G and bottom up networks. No video available, unfortunately, so I'll do my best to cover the news.

Thursday April 21, we move to NYU for the Brooklyn 5G Summit. Fettweis is joining again, along with Andrea Goldsmith of Stanford and CTOs from Alcatel. NTT, and many more. Both Thursday and Friday will be streamed by IEEE.

April 13, some of the best engineers in the world will come to New York and plant cable's flag at the heart of the wireless world. After the event, no one should doubt that cable be a player. Featured speaker Ted Rappaport leads perhaps the world's best wireless research center at NYU. Rahim Tafazolli at Surrey and Gerhard Fettweis at TU Dresden have groups that are contenders for that title. CableLabs is organizing the event and sending their best. 

I call Ted, "The Prince of 28 GHz." Ted's group convinced the industry that 28 GHz mobile can work by taking a test rig around Manhattan and Brooklyn for thousands of tests. He's a dynamic speaker and a reason 5G high frequencies lead the discussion. Possibly the toughest question in future wireless is whether millimeter wave or many antenna MIMO will dominate. Both will be the right choice some places. High demand and concentrated customers call for the capacity of millimeter. The greater reach and probable lower cost of many antennas (MU MIMO) in lower frequencies are more likely in less dense regions.

Top analysts Jonathan Chapin and Paul de Sa will discuss ways cable could become the best wireless networks in the United States. Day One, they can have over 10,000,000 cell sites simply with the WiFi in home gateways.

The telco problem is how to sell all the capacity coming online. Cisco's Visual Network Index offers the best data anywhere on current mobile trends as well as respected future forecasts. You can spend hours on the report. Skip quickly over the discussion at the top, which emphasizes select data points suggesting growth. Jump into the charts and tables. Here're some of the first things I noticed.

Growth in the U.S. is down to 50%/year and predicted to fall below 40%. Traffic soared as people first acquired smartphones, over 100% for a couple of years. 75% of the devices in the U.S. today are smart. "Average smartphone usage grew 43 percent in 2015. The average amount of traffic per smartphone in 2015 was 929 MB per month, up from 648 MB per month in 2014." The smartphone conversion still has a way to go, perhaps to 95% in a few years. The new users will continue to raise the growth rate, but much less than in the past. On the other hand, only 12% of the devices in the Middle East and Africa are "smart." $50-$100 smartphones are already changing that rapidly. Cisco expects the percentage to rise to over 50% by 2020, driving traffic growth rates much higher. Africans are buying so many smartphones there will be more Africans on the web than Americans around 2018. Detailed table below

The economic impact of wireless growth will approach insignificance in the developed world.

Within the year, hoping to increase fixed wireless speeds 50+%. Telecom Italia deployed a Kumu unit in Turin for LTE backhaul using the full duplex bandwidth. The 3GPP standard has included "LTE Relay" since 2009 but that hasn't been practical. Qualcomm is sampling the Snapdragon 820 Cat 12 LTE chip, capable of 600 megabits. TI thinks they've found a backhaul solution. 

World-leading engineers believe wireless capacity will grow at least 50x in coming years. They include Marconi Prize winners Marty Cooper, Arogyaswami Paulraj, Henry Samueli and Vint Cerf. MIMO will yield at least a 10X improvement. AT&T and Verizon both have enough unused spectrum to double or triple current LTE capacity. Full duplex has the potential to double everything, and the researchers are confident of at least a 50% improvement most places. Back of the envelope, I believe a 25X increase in wireless capacity is possible without raising capital spending. 

Nearly 50% price drop with new entrant into the world's most competitive market. Update 5/11 ET points to October for the full launch http://bit.ly/1Tac78M Mega-billionaire Mukesh Ambani has built a 4G network to 70% of India, with 90% expected by the official launch. Reliance Jio will bring in lower prices, $60 LTE phones and should be the most important telecom event of 2016. Reliance Jio is already running a large beta with employees and setting up dealers. 

To fill that network, Ambani is offering one of the lowest prices in the world. He's already taken delivery on half a million SIM cards and requesting proposals for $50-75 mobiles in the tens of millions. The other big Indians telcos (Bharti, Vodafone and Idea) have responded by moving up their own 4G buildouts, which will soon take over the country. The increased investment is yet another confirmation that competition, not company profits, is the key determinant of investment. They will presumably reduce prices soon as well. 

Ambani initially will concentrate on fixed wireless for broadband rather than mobile voice.

Market for mobile chips disappearing. When Henry Samueli shut down Broadcom's cellular baseband business, I happened to be visiting one of the founders. Many of the 3,000 engineers affected were his friends and the pain was apparent. However, I could see why the decision was necessary. Apple and Samsung dominate the mobile phone business and each made their own chips. Those two companies had growing market share and there just wasn't enough merchant business to sustain the chip vendors. Qualcomm's scale gives them a major advantage and the very efficient Mediatek has also grown.

Huawei, #3 or #4 in cell phone sales, is taking a similar path. Top analyst Linley Gwennap (quote in the headline) is enthusiastic about the new Huawei chip. He believes, "The new chip will outperform both the Snapdragon 810 and the Exynos 7420 on most mobile benchmarks, setting a new bar for smartphone performance."

Detail of Cedalion standing on the shoulders of Orion by Nicolas PoussinEngineers know this because they stand on the shoulders of giants. Policy people  are too often blinded by the fog of interests. With just the spectrum already allocated, AT&T and Verizon could easily triple their network capacity without breaking the capital budget. The technology is obvious but the change in business models is unlikely. Sprint has remarkable holdings around 2.5GHz. Dish spectrum is totally unused.

There's enough available spectrum to build at least three Verizon-sized networks. The currently allocated but unused spectrum is allowing both AT&T and Verizon to double their wireless capabilities. I wrote this article because <yet another generally very knowledgeable> person just left that doubling out of his predictions. It's commonly overlooked.

My estimate is that spectrum, advanced technology and investment can easily provide a 25x gain many without blowing out capex budgets - if policy is smarter.  The increased costs should be no more than 2% of sales and probably much less.