Amended from Wireless Week: 

A year ago, the convergence of wireline and wireless networks became apparent, setting the stage for a new breed of communication companies to emerge. Twelve months later, we are closer to a reality where people will have ubiquitous access to broadband-based services for voice, video and data, either fixed or mobile. We still have a long way to go, but several important trends are emerging as we look to 2006 and beyond.

As the industry moves toward mobile broadband networks that go beyond current 3G capabilities, carriers are focusing their attention on considering and evaluating the deployment of technologies based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), to prepare for the capacity demand of millions of subscribers consuming an aggregate of terabytes of data. In context, 1,000 subscribers consuming 1 GB of data per month, by themselves, means 1 TB of data has to traverse the radio access network (RAN), to the edge and into the network core. This proposition scares most carriers, especially when they will make broadband data services available to millions of paying subscribers.

After almost 15 years of successful growth using circuit-switched technologies, the mobile telecommunications world is making the move toward OFDM-based mobile networks for higher capacity and IP services. OFDM is the technology earmarked for "beyond 3G" networks and is currently used in various audio and video broadcast standards, as well as in Wi-Fi and fixed wireless access technologies such as WiMAX and FLASH-OFDM for mobile broadband. 3GPP is currently reviewing submissions to use OFDM as a future enhancement to 3G, and the CDMA group has announced its future move toward OFDM-based air-link solutions. Global operators such as NTT DoCoMo, Vodafone, T-Mobile and Telstra have publicly announced OFDM-based network trials. Nextel Communications has been testing FLASH-OFDM since 2002. Vendors such as Siemens, Nortel and Motorola have all demonstrated high-speed data solutions using OFDM, with more to come.