This thesis describes fundamental approaches to quantify rate versus power consumption tradeoffs for cascaded communication systems. The discussion is bolstered by a large number of in-situ channel measurements, which are used in discussions of the power consumption of future massively broadband cellular systems. Chapter one provides an introduction. Chapter two discusses power consumption trends in modern communication systems. Chapter three introduces the consumption factor framework. Chapter four discusses the channel measurement campaign. Chapter five concludes the thesis, and uses the measurement results to estimate power consumption and capacity of future cellular systems. In addition, chapter five extends the consumption factor theory and draws fundamental conclusions about the energy price per bit for a general cascaded communication system. / text