As 4G demand balloons, here come the "super" base stations

The 2015 Mobile World Congress kicks off in March, and this year network equipment makers seem particularly focused on building bigger, badder base stations -- the processing workhorses of any cellular network -- as demand for more LTE speed and capacity hits new highs around the world. But the mobile industry has started to question whether this constant cycle of cell site upgrades is really the best way to build a network.

Instead mobile infrastructure vendors have started looking to the data center as a model for future network design. Instead of building a huge amount of processing power into every cell site, they can put all of that baseband capacity in the cloud and divvy it out to cells as demand dictates. The concept is called Cloud-RAN (RAN standing for Radio Access Network) and carriers like China Mobile, SK Telecom and Telefónica are already testing it out with the help of Intel and many of many telecom equipment makers.