In eight years we might be paying just $1 per day for a gigabyte of data. That's the word from Nokia Siemens Networks CTO Hossein Moiin, who believes mobile operators will need to play a transformative role to pass cost savings down to customers. He is confident on his vision and he expects operators to supplement the low-cost bandwidth with other services. With mobile connections currently at more than six billion worldwide, and the GSMA predicting the figure will double in the next ten years, the less expensive data will arrive as operators increase the capacity of their networks by 1,000 times, ready for 2020, Moiin says.

In an interview with Global Telecoms Business, Moiin also touches on a post-4G future. "We have a beyond-4G programme," he says, but any 5G networks will involve another generation of radio technology. "We will have to do it all again. It’s a lot of work. It gets harder and harder," he adds. Although research is already underway on the future of mobile networks, the current generation should last until around 2020 as 4G standards were fully ratified in 2011. Moiin didn't touch on roaming rates during the interview, but with the GSMA backing cell-to-Wi-Fi roaming we hope to see those particular costs reduced by 2020 too.