Bandwidth

Cellcos: One Thing – Bandwidth

Posted by Sam Churchill on October 9th, 2009

Mitch: Hi Curly. Kill anyone today?
Curly: Day ain’t over yet.
- City Slickers

At the CTIA I.T. & Entertainment show in San Diego this year, the cellular industry spoke with one voice; it needs capacity.

The Data Tsunami Is Here, reported MocoNews:

• AT&T’s CTO Jon Donovan said data traffic on AT&T’s network has jumped 5,000 percent over the past 12 quarters. Wireless packet data has grown 18 times in the last two and a half years while voice merely doubled, he said.
• AT&T’s Ralph de la Vega said more regulation will only stifle innovation: “We believe in an open internet and a mobile internet that is free of regulation. We want to be part of constructive dialogue.
• Verizon’s CTO advocates for metered broadband pricing. CTO Dick Lynch told press and attendees at at fiber-to-the-home industry conference in Houston that broadband service providers “cannot continue to grow the Internet without passing the cost on to someone. Verizon expects orders of magnitude increases in traffic on their 4G network in the next couple of years.
• Qualcomm said offloading traffic via WiFi or dedicated video networks like Qualcomm’s MediaFLO might help with future congestion
• One Openwave analyst said one smartphone equals 30 feature phones on a network, and one netbook or aircard equals 450 feature phones.
• The CTIA released a survey, finding that wireless data revenues made up more than 25 percent of all revenues and that there are more than 40 million official smartphones and 10 million other devices being used in the U.S. The CTIA wants the FCC to supply an additional 800 mhz of bandwidth by 2015.
• FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski acknowledged more spectrum was needed. “The FCC, in recent years, has authorized a threefold increase in spectrum. The problem is that some anticipate a thirtyfold increase in traffic.”
• Metered billing is not inevitable says DSL Reports, amid proposals from some writers to charge $10 a month for each 100 MB as a possible solution. But, “the cost of collecting charges on each transaction, both in real terms for the operator and the user and in dissuading total demand by increasing marginal costs…makes [metering] too expensive,” say other industry observers.

A Cisco Mobile Forecast for 2008-2013 noted that a single high-end data phone today generates more data traffic than 30 basic-feature cell phones, while a single laptop air card generates more data traffic than 450 basic-feature cell phones. Cisco projects that mobile data traffic will increase a thousand-fold over the seven years from 2005 through 2012, with video being a significant component.

source : dailywireless.org