The industry is prone to take the easiest/least costly way out, pushing for more spectrum and co-use of Wi-Fi spectrum for LTE rather than expend the efforts to innovate. These special use cases are often difficult to justify on a cost basis because the operator revenue model, subscriber and premium services plans, does not provide the means to fund the specific capex or pursue R&D specific to the situation. However, the highest density use scenarios can help spur the problem solving innovations that will be needed to densify deployments more broadly: advances in interference mitigation, use of higher order MIMO, Co-MIMO and MU-MIMO/CoMP and advanced tiered use of spectrum can serve as excellent test beds to push evolution forward.

An advantage of stadium/intermittent use locations is these are vacant much of the time, providing a deployment and test environment scenario that can be used to test out new technologies and interplay of methods. The event goers are, in one way of looking at it, the guinea pigs in the experimental development of advanced uses of technology that operators can pull the best of breed solutions into the broader market. Rather than looking at this as abusing the use of the public/guinea pigs, they will be getting the privilege, with fall back, of free use of future mainstream technologies and methods.

it is for this reason that Telstra is moving quickly on LTE-B .. See http://www.whistleout.com.au/MobilePhones/News/Telstra-LTE-B-trial-successful. with supportive comments made by Telstra at Communicasia in Singapore last week. Cheers