Small cells

The aforementioned Amdocs study also finds that 59 percent of CSPs expect to deploy at least 10 times more small cells by 2017 than they did in 2011, provided they can find the capital necessary for such rollouts. (You can read more about small-cell strategies HERE.)

Wi-Fi offloading

Eighty-eight percent of the CSPs surveyed by Amdocs plan to add Wi-Fi to their mobile services by 2016, part of an effort to offload considerable resources to terrestrial networks wherever possible. (We cover Wi-Fi strategies in more detail HERE.) Metrocells and HetNets will likewise play strategic roles.

Network visibility

However, any and all strategies will require much smarter networks if they’re to be implemented, and many network congestion issues can be resolved through similarly intelligent network planning, monitoring and optimization as well as bandwidth management.

Small cells, for example, need to be deployed strategically, within meters of their target areas, in order to have any effect. The overall expense of other high-capacity network builds can also be limited through careful network planning.

In addition, better network visibility can lead to a much more efficient allocation of network resources. Andy Huckridge, director of service provider solutions for Gigamon, a network-intelligence solution provider, told Pipeline that products like Gigamon’s Visibility Fabric Management solution allow CSPs to “decrease the number of tools you need by around 80 percent and increase [your] utilization from around 20 percent each to much higher levels.”

Solutions such as these allow CSPs to redeploy older tools that have lower or different connectivity speeds, thus extending their usefulness, Huckridge says, because the solutions “take care of load-balancing traffic across the range of connected tools, preserving session information.” He adds that such efforts can reduce capital expenditures (CAPEX) by 80 percent and operating expenditures (OPEX) by 50 percent for a given installation.

Plus, the buildout process itself can be done in a way that includes baked-in monitoring and optimization technology that’s designed to relieve future congestion while still meeting the needs of present usage out in the access network rather than in the core. Mobixell, for instance, just rolled out a built-in video optimization solution for LTE access hardware that sits in the cell site, where it can get more accurate traffic management readings but consume fewer backhaul resources.

By increasing visibility both at the core and the cell sites, CSPs can get a better handle on where the hotspots are and better understand where highly targeted offloading strategies make sense, as well as where they don’t.

Massive network buildouts and spectrum auctions are big, arduous undertakings, and definitely part of the future of network capacity management. But just as a highway needs heavy construction efforts and careful traffic monitoring and well-designed interchanges and so many other components to keep traffic flowing, wireless networks need an all-viable-options model to meet ravenous customer demand.