In the next four years, wireless carriers will need to find a way to transmit more than 30 times the volume of data than their networks carry today.

How they’ll succeed in meeting that demand, given the world’s rapidly increasing dependence on wireless communications and the limits of available spectrum, represents one of the great challenges for engineers. It’s also a central question for business and government executives planning for a more enabled mobile workforce.

New techniques to fully exploit the physical limits of wireless spectrum and available bandwidth, under the best of foreseeable circumstances, will only increase capacity by a factor of two, said Dr. Tod Sizer (pictured) who leads a team of engineers at Bell Labs, now a part of Alcatel-Lucent.