Intelligent CIO North America Issue 15 | Page 76

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Specifically and as an example , consumers in the US will go from an average consumption of 15GB per month this year , to more than 50GB in 2026 , with a compound growth rate , CAGR , of 30 %.
This means a larger deployment of devices than today , to obtain lower latency , greater consistency in connectivity and connectivity ranges consistent with the type of device .
Other regions , such as Latin America , also present interesting figures in demand growth , with a CAGR of 7.4 % between 2020 and 2021 , according to Rod Smith , Vice President of Operations at American Towers .
The business outlook in this region , as well as in Europe and Africa , also changes as the acquisition of Telxius Towers from Telefónica allows a gain in markets such as Argentina , Brazil , Chile and Peru . The deal was closed in June of this year and reached US $ 1.1 billion for the 7,000 towers in Latin America .
The towers evolve
The Internet of Things , IoT , becomes the axis of this trend if we take into account the growth forecasted by American Tower in both the number of connected devices and bandwidth per user .
According to American Towers , the growth of IoT devices will go from US $ 155 million in 2020 to US $ 426 million in 2026 .
The transmission towers will also be affected by the transition from 3G and 4G to 5G as it will go from simple equipment connected to SISO antennas coupled by a coaxial cable to the 3G base station that includes the baseband unit , the transceivers , the amplifiers and other auxiliary equipment , to a more specialized connection , made up of MIMO multiband antennas , based on 2X2 MIMO that have already become common thanks to LTE but which will go to 4x2 and then 4x4 , thus obtaining greater efficiency in terms of the use of the spectrum .
Likewise , remote radio heads will be connected that will include transceiver cards , power amplifiers and filters necessary to improve connectivity .
The antennas will also evolve towards new fiberoptic-based connectivity that will add better performance to the multiple interactiowns taking place in increasingly shorter times , to access the LTE base unit that can be deployed at the base of the tower or in a remotely connected data center , taking advantage of the Cloud RAN ( Radio Access Network ) architecture , which considerably improves existing connectivity methodologies .
Basically , and according to Ericsson , Cloud RAN allows the use of COTS ( hardware platforms , out of the box ) including accelerators , native architecture in the cloud , management , automation and orchestration , and programmability in RAN .
This means a larger deployment of devices than today , to obtain lower latency , greater consistency in
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