Modified version of the figure in www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Hyderabad/article539940.ece
As the demand for wireless services has increased lately, so have the number of cell towers so that users’ expectations can be met. Since technology is moving on at really rapid pace, the wireless world wants to decrease the number of deployed towers by introducing small and tiny antennas that could even be hold in a hand.
‘-We see more and more towers that become bigger and bigger, with more and bigger antennas that come to obstruct our view and clutter our landscape and are simply ugly,’ said Wim Sweldens, president of the wireless division of Alcatel-Lucent, the French-U.S. maker of telecommunications equipment.
For cell phone companies, the benefits of dividing their networks into smaller “cells,”…, go far beyond esthetics. Smaller cells mean vastly higher capacity for calls and data traffic. Instead of having all phones within a mile or two connect to the same cell tower, the traffic could be divided between several smaller cells, so there’s less competition for the cell tower’s attention.
LM Ericsson AB, the Swedish company that’s the largest maker of wireless network equipment in the world, is also introducing a more compact antenna, one it calls “the first stepping stone towards a heterogeneous network.”
Read the complete article: No more cell towers
more likely it leads for even more attention to “smart cell”.. like femto solutions.
Well, you should read Claes blogpost
http://www.theunwiredpeople.com/blog/alcatel-lucent-saves-the-mobile-industry-.html
Some thing can be made smaller, where as the size of some other things (like antennas and towers for wide area coverage) are still ruled by the laws of nature. Decreasing their size, will unfortunately lead to worse performance.
The reason why we will see less (new) towers is not because ALU makes the antenna smaller, but because we need more capacity and less coverage where all the people are.
Interference is another limitation here