Fist-Sized Cellular Antennas Will Help Feed Data-Hungry Smartphones

Several new cellular antenna technologies eventually could remove the steel-tree cell towers' blight on the landscape while improving signal coverage and making more bandwidth available for Web-connected smartphones. Several wireless network equipment vendors have been demonstrating such products this week in Barcelona, Spain at the Mobile World Congress , the world's largest cell phone trade show. The new technology can't arrive soon enough for the carriers. A deluge of demand from smartphones and the nascent tablet PC market in the next few years threatens to overwhelm current wireless networks, even with the ongoing deployment of the next-generation network LTE, or Long Term Evolution. Carriers will need to handle 26 times the volume of data traffic in 2015 as they did in 2010, according to Cisco Systems Inc.'s (NASDAQ: CSCO ) latest Visual Networking Index Forecast.