Nokia's Moiin Believes Massive MIMO/Interference Cancellation is Ready to Come Out of the Labs
Verizon and Nokia are ready to test. Nokia CTO Hossein Moiin intends to test Antonio Forenza's pCell technology early next year. Last year, I wrote extremely skeptically about Artemis/pCell informed by three very respected engineers. CEO Steve Perlman made wildly implausible claims, including that they would deploy across 350 San Francisco rooftops by the end of last year. They haven't been seen.
Moiin is a respected, independent engineer. I have to look again. USC Prof Giuseppe Caire now says "The early trials showed pCell achieving far higher concurrent user capacity than any wireless technology I am aware of." That's very different from his earlier comments (below) and I assume he's been shown something newer. Peter White at Faultline has an important article about semi-secret trials in U.S. sports stadiums. (Paywall.)
Verizon in a startling move Monday told analysts they would soon test Massive MIMO and beamforming. (pCell is very similar.) These are key "5G" tools that weren't expected until about 2020.
Essentially, beamforming focuses the radio signal. It's concentrated and stronger to an individual receiver such as a mobile phone or WiFi. It's sometimes described as "steering" the signal. It's been used in radar and sonar for decades. More recently, it's common in 802.11ac WiFi and built into some wireless standards. As processing power becomes cheaper with Moore's Law, more powerful systems become practical. 
AT&T, Verizon cram 3-5 as many people on each cell site. AT&T has 50,000 cells, China Mobile 1,000,000, SK Korea 35,000, Spain 33,000. Currently, Albania, The Maldive Islands, and at least a dozen other countries have faster LTE networks than the USA. The chart is adjusted for population and AT&T obviously stands out. Verizon would be similar.
NYU Wireless has just reported on 14,000 tests using 28 GHz and 73 GHz indoors. The paper isn't online yet so I put the abstract below. Professor Ted Rappaport believes, "These high frequencies will be an effective substitute when today's Wi-Fi frequencies get crowded."
Most experts thought it would require fiber. Karolina Wikander is confident. "Microwave backhaul technology is already able to handle 100 percent of all radio access sites' capacity needs, both now and in the future. By 2020, the technology will have evolved to support multi-Gb capacities in traditional frequency bands and beyond 10 Gb in the millimeter wave."
Same frequency, same time, ?double wireless speeds. Today, self-interference makes it impractical to send and receive at the same time on the same frequencies. Testing at