Amdocs today released the findings of a survey of 65 global mobile and converged service providers that highlights the substantial network planning challenges posed by a 20-fold increase in data demand. Rethink Technology Research, the firm contracted to conduct the study, reports that service providers will turn to millions of small cells and Wi-Fi offloading to boost network capacity, but a lack of network planning resources is a hurdle that nearly half of the services providers face.

Other key survey findings:

• Huge increase in mobile data capacity needed: 94 percent of service providers are planning for 20-fold growth or more by 2017. Of these, 24 percent foresee 50-fold growth.
• New technologies such as 4G and LTE are only part of the solution: All service providers said that the latest 4G and LTE technologies would deliver only part of the efficiencies required. To optimize network performance, they will need sophisticated new network planning and management tools in addition to technologies that are part of the LTE specification, such as Self-Organizing Networks.
  
• Network investment continues to grow: 50 percent of service providers expect to increase their capital expenditure by 10-20 percent between 2012 and 2017 and 23 percent plan to increase it by even more. None expect to reduce their capital spending.
  
• Wi-Fi offloading expected to help ease data burden: 88 percent of service providers expect to offer Wi-Fi as part of their mobile services by 2016, with 22 percent anticipating they will have Wi-Fi integrated into at least half of their cell sites by the end of 2017, further reducing the data burden on 3G and LTE.
  

“Service providers are facing a data storm, forecasting more than a 20-fold data demand increase over the next five years, but 4G is not going to solve this problem on its own as the majority of devices will remain on 3G,” said Caroline Gabriel, research director at Rethink Technology Research. “The solution is small cells, which are perfect for boosting capacity and coverage in fixed locations, but the need to add millions of new cells has created a network planning bottleneck and service providers need to find smarter planning tools to speed the process.”

“With service provider budgets under increasing pressure, the huge number of small cell deployments represents a significant investment,” said Rebecca Prudhomme, Amdocs vice president of product and solutions marketing. “They will need to rely on sophisticated and flexible network planning approaches to maximize efficiency and automation in order to remain competitive.”

--Jesse Cryderman, Senior Editor

Source: Amdocs Press Release