By Tim Young
Traffic Jam:
No one enjoys being stuck in traffic. As you read this article, you may still be recovering from your morning or evening commute. In fact, if traffic is particularly nasty in your neck of the woods, you may be reading this article while you’re sitting in near-standstill traffic (though that’s something I can’t say I recommend).
Now, let’s say you get so fed up with the traffic that you decide to leave and go somewhere where there are no cars at all. After three years on this carless island, you return home, rested and tanned, to find that traffic hasn’t improved. In fact, it’s gotten worse. Much worse.
Traffic has gotten so bad that there are fifty times as many cars on the road as there were just three years earlier. A 5,000% increase in three short years.
I’d imagine that you’d turn around and head right back to your car-free island.
While such an increase in auto traffic is fantasy, such an increase in wireless data traffic is all-too-real for a number of wireless carriers. In fact, AT&T reported at 4G World that they’ve seen precisely such a growth in just as short a period: 5000% more wireless traffic flows across AT&T’s wireless network than they saw just three years ago. |
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You may be thinking:
“Let’s all blame the iPhone.” |
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In addition, Motorola has reported that 78 percent of US wireless users now have a cell phone capable of accessing the internet. 40 Million Americans are active users of mobile internet services.
And that’s just the beginning.
Technology players from Intel to Amdocs cite analyst projections that network will support over one trillion devices by 2015. Smartphones. Netbooks. A whole new slate of devices that are becoming mobile data-capable like Kindles and satellite navigation systems. All of these devices are attempting to find a spot on a crowded spectrum for their respective data.
From the standpoint of supply and demand, there seems to be a nearly limitless demand for wireless data. Users have indicated,
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And I know what you may be thinking: Let’s all blame the iPhone. To do so, however, would ignore the fact that increased data usage is not a phenomenon limited to a single device or a single network. The Wireless Communications Association International notes that a typical smartphone uses 30 times as much data as a traditional wireless phone, and a connected notebook/netbook consumes 450 times as much data. A traditional wireless phone, with regular consumer usage patterns, uses around 30 megabytes of data a month. A wireless laptop user can chew through 13GB in that same time span.
And AT&T is by no means alone in their data explosion. Hong Kong’s OFTA released numbers early this year that stated that wireless users in Hong Kong used 14 times as much wireless data as they did just 2 years ago.
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through their usage patterns, that they’re increasingly coming to expect to access any service, anywhere and at any time.
Furthermore, the demand for data is outpacing the increase in profitability. One recent study put revenue growth in the wireless sector at 2x over the next five years. A doubling in revenue is welcome,
So how can wireless providers confront this onslaught of data?
Handling the Flood:
Building additional towers or allocating additional bandwidth would be helpful, but is a tremendously slow proposition. Furthermore, the demand for data is increasing at such an explosive rate that even if providers had the wherewithal to build all the towers that they’d need to meet raw demand (and they don’t), the rate of
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