As you say, the 20 MHz of spectrum doesn’t solve the 20-fold increase Verizon is projecting by YE 2015. But 20 MHz NOW — combined with the efficiency improvements from LTE Advance and HetNet architecture in 2013 and 2014 may. The challenge for operators from a business perspective is WiFi is both complimentary and competitive. Operators need to offer more control over the customer experience – not less – in order to compete with the OTT. Hence why I think were seeing solutions like ALU’s WiFi lightRadio.

I definitely agree that the big efficiencies are coming later with LTE Advanced, and Verizon needs near term solutions as well. But what about Wi-Fi seems like a critical tool that’s available today. It may just be a bandaid while waiting for the bigger cure, but it’s probably cheaper than building denser networks for now. The point I’m making is Verizon’s picture is very bleak, so bleak, in fact, that a simple one-off 20 MHz spectrum sale would have very little impact. It can’t be the whole picture.

Did Qcom do a white paper on this? Got a link? I’d love to see it as would some of our other readers I’m guessing.

Verizon Wireless dismisses small cells as a remedy. At the same time, however, 45% partner Vodafone recently made small cells a pillar of its plan to increase capacity in the UK. See http://www.wilson-street.com/2011/11/femtocells-not-something-to-be-embarrassed-about/ Is there something that makes small cells good for one but not the other?

The notion of a 1.5x or 2x spectrum increase performing better than a small cell deployment doesn’t make sense, when Qualcomm has analyses showing that a reasonable deployment of small cells in a macrocell provides a capacity gain of up to 10x in that macrocell. Indeed, Qualcomm is backing off the spectrum hype some and now saying that “the next performance and capacity leap will come from network topology evolution by using a mix of macro cells and small cells – also referred to as a Heterogeneous Network (HetNet) – effectively bringing the network closer to the user.” I agree.

At the moment I’m indifferent on the spectrum sale, but some of what’s being offered in support doesn’t make sense to me. One of the main points of LTE Advanced, which I presume Verizon Wireless will eventually migrate too, is to facilitate deployment of small cells to increase capacity many times over what one can do with spectrum alone.