 as well or preferably better than WiFi for local connectivity implies a relatively aggressive adoption of MIMO techniques in LTE user equipment. The question then to answer is how often users will be close enough to an LTE base station to realise a real benefit from the composite MIMO LTE channel and how many of those users would actually be better served from a WiFi channel. The answer is probably not a lot or at least not enough to warrant the additional cost and complexity and weight and size and power drain added to some or most LTE devices. For certain, it would seem that MIMO will deliver very marginal gains in larger-diameter cells, for example anything larger than a picocell or femtocell and may have a negative impact on throughput in many wide-area access channel conditions. In terms of band allocations this would suggest MIMO might be useful at 2.6 GHz and above but less useful in lower bands and more or less pointless at or below 1 GHz. This is just as well given the problems of getting enough volume and distance to achieve effective spatial antenna separation in low band device designs. Additionally, there are proposals in LTE Advanced to bond channels together. This could either be adjacent channel bonding or bonding two channels from different bands, which would imply a need for yet another RX/TX processing path. The rather pointless marketing pursuit of headline data rates is therefore resulting in the industry investing R and D dollars that from an end-user-experience perspective would be better being spent at least initially on optimising SISO performance within the existing band plans. In other words, present R and D priorities are probably disproportionate to the proportionate user experience gain that can be achieved. Inefficiently focused R and D spending has associated opportunity cost (indirect cost). The direct and indirect costs of MIMO investment (and or work on channel bonding) have to be recovered from all LTE devices. In the longer term, WiFi semiconductor vendors including Atheros a