Wireless big data are our wireless edge networks ready?

The wireless industry has served the world for more than a century. More recently over the last 30 years, the evolution of the cellular industry and wireless mobility has radically changed the very nature and socialization of human communications globally, now reaching almost every human being on the planet. But with its success, cellular communications is also reaching a nexus point, a point of change that raises questions as to its long term sustainability in its current form. The radio spectrum used for cellular communications today is both fragmented and limited in channel size, and in aggregation provides only a Gigahertz worth of spectrum worldwide - a condition making it ill-suited for the emergence of wireless “big data” transport. To utilize this very limited spectrum capacity for the evolving role of cellular communications, service providers are deploying enhanced technologies, network topologies and increasingly complex modulation methods to extract the remaining network capacity from this spectrum band. Going forward and in light of the remarkable and ongoing growth in wireless data, will these network enhancements and reliance on existing cellular and Wi-Fi spectrum alone be enough to sustain voice and data cellular infrastructure and network capacity well into the future? Or alternatively, and in addition to existing infrastructure, will new high capacity spectrum, new spectrum policies, non-traditional technologies and network topologies be required to meet emerging cellular and wireless data challenges.