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"In order to meet the ever-increasing demands of mobile cellular users, radio access networks are designed today mainly with the goal of maximizing spectral efficiency. Such designs make efficient use of the frequency spectrum at hand, but also significantly increase the energy consumption and carbon footprint of the network. Consequently, increasing power demand in wireless networks is a long-standing problem, seeking significant attention in both academia and industry due to economic concerns of operators (increased operational expenses) and global environmental concerns towards green networking. This paper takes a long view on this problem, envisioning a nextG scenario where quantum computation has become operational for cellular baseband processing. We share educated insights on power consumption, ownership costs, deployment timelines, computational throughput, and latency issues surrounding quantum technology. Based on these insights, we project the performance goals future quantum hardware needs to achieve over each of these dimensions in order to provide a computational power advantage over silicon hardware in wireless networks, while achieving spectral efficiency equal to silicon-based processing, in the network as a whole."
