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World in 2015: Half a billion of these (hold up iPad/iPhone). 60+% used at home/office. Jennie often watches on iPad for convenience rather than 50 inch TV

• Bill Smith of AT&T explains “the sooner I get the bit to ground, the cheaper it is.” Except for Verizon, every large carrier I know intends to offload as much as possible. Physics is in favor: signals get weaker with distance. Economics are the driver, with 1/3rd to 2/3rd savings promised by optimists.
• Cisco’s estimate is that 22% of U.S. mobile data will be off-loaded in 2013 and I’d guess in 2015-2016 that will be much higher. In a world where everyone carries an iPad, iPhone or similar logging into WiFi/femto will be natural.
• Estimates of 30-70% offload a few years out are common and make sense to me. Different carriers and different countries are going at divergent paces.
• LTE is great but 3G will dominate most places until 2016-2018
• Don’t forget small cells like Alcatel lightRadio, Ericsson Het Nets, ?Ruckus. SON & interference management probably biggest factor in capacity. High backhaul costs currently killing. $3K is cheap for 100 meg microwave.
• Sidenote. We have the speed in LTE 5-15 megabits. We don’t have the capacity. 2-8 gigabytes/month is only a few hours of video/week. Advanced can do 25-75 gigabyte caps if competition/regulation pushes. Not preferred business model. Verizon demo’ing how to charge Hulu, NetFlix, Google for video.

“The World as One Big Hotspot” Ian Scales

• China Mobile announced 1M hotspots; Korea Telecom, KDDI, and many others will soon be in 6 figures. Softbank in Japan is virtually giving both a DSL connections and a femto/WiFi gateway shared to new mobile customers, Free in France has 4.7M WiFi gateways, many of which will be turned on for mobile roaming. The Revolution Freebox has 3x3 MIMO and a femtocell. DT’s new gateway has 3x3 MIMO and I’m sure they and Voda in Germany will put WiFi to major use.
• Femtos have only sold about 1M and probably 1BWiFi. AT&T postponed indefinitely their rollout of 5M for a cloud across the U.S. Ralph de la Vega says interference problems near the towers are not yet solved. I speak of WiFi/femto because many carriers preferred femtos, including Vodafone, to control the customer. My guess is that with ubiquitous WiFi phones/pads WiFi will win, but still unproven.
• Traffic growth gated by caps and pricing. Some expect it to dramatically slow outside of WiFi coverage. Unclear.

Drivers of even more demand for best in class WiFi