Verizon Ready to Try Massive MIMO and Beamforming
Hoping for 2017 although almost no one expected this before 2020 and "5G." CEO Lowell McAdams told analysts Verizon plans "Staying ~two years ahead of competitors in network performance." Massive MIMO and beamforming deliver "Huge gains in spectral efficiency." Delivered wireless can increase two to ten times over the next few years using arrays of thirty-five to hundreds of antennas. A 10x jump wouldn't surprise any of the researchers. Pulling that far ahead is probably an impossible dream. AT&T has almost caught up with Verizon.
Until this week, almost everyone thought substantial Massive MIMO deployment unlikely until 2020 and 5G. The excellent Bernstein analyst Paul de Sa was the first to report "VZ will soon begin market trials of 5G capabilities including 'massive MIMO' (which is when a large number of antennas are packed into a single device) and beam forming (which is when a wireless signal is concentrated on a specific location)." I confirmed with a second analyst what was said.
Beginning trials soon would suggest deployment in 2017 if they go well.
10x or 100x more wireless throughput using many antennas. Masayoshi Son at Softbank has just deployed the first commercial Massive MIMO systems. 100 systems, each with 128 antennas, are being deployed in Japan. The early results show 6-10X capacity improvements. Some of the world's best engineers - Henry Samueli, Andrea Goldsmith, Arogyaswami Paulraj, Vint Cerf - expect ultimately MIMO will yield a 50X improvement. (That's not guaranteed, of course.)
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 
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."