Speaking at the IEF conference in Germany’s the Technische Universitat in Dresden, Gerhard Fettweis, Vodafone chair professor told his audience he believed 100 billion cellular devices would be connected using LTE in less than a decade.
According to UK based site TechEye, Fettweis’ predictions depend on LTE actually taking off properly in 2012, with LTE Advanced to follow in 2015.
Small testbeds of the technology – being set up in collaboration with the likes of Qualcomm, Alcatel-Lucent and Infineon – are already up and running, including in Dresden itself, but until the technology gets rolled out on a global scale, the results are hard to quantify.
Fettweis apparently noted that with LTE chips being embedded into all kinds of things, from handheld devices to lighting, to airplane seats, the number of connected devices could double current estimates and reach 100 billion cellular enabled devices by 2020.
Not only would there be a plethora of connections, the speed of those connections would also be able to support 3D and virtual reality on 100Gb/sec interconnects.
“With LTE we can fit everything in a quarter or maybe even one tenth of a chip,” he boasted.
