Will there be a new network menace this Christmas?

This year, in my humble opinion, has been the most progressive in terms of the connected Mobile device. Lead by the iPhone (in concept, if not in practice), devices and services have been being bound together to give us access to the Interweb like never before. As we gear up for Christmas, devices are even being released that target specific services (check out 3’s INQ Mobile with Facebook!).

So what does this mean for Mobile Networks?

In previous years, the thing that used to kill the Mobile Networks were the growing amount of SMSs, sent on Christmas Eve/Day, and then again on New Years’ Eve/Day – I should know, I used to be responsible for fixing some of the SMSCs that keeled over!

This became more and more of an issue each year, until Operators built out huge capacity in their network for SMS, and then introduced retry throttling (that really helps things), and also proxy storage (essentially a flow-control valve to the SMSC).

But bringing back in the ‘Connected Mobile’ for a moment, we now have MANY more devices that will be trying to form data connections, mostly I should imagine on Christmas morning – little Johnny will be there, trying to update his Facebook or Myspace status on his phone, and getting no bandwidth, or even worse possibly, being bumped off whichever network he is connected to.

You see, it’s my view that Network Operators have not expanded their data-connection-handling capability anywhere near as much as their SMS handling, because (a) it was not a direct revenue generator previously and (b) there wasn’t much traffic. But this Christmas I think there could be a seed change in the way things happen, as many more devices that ever before get the mains charger attached, SIM inserted, and powered on – imagine the flood of data-connection requests each network is going to get!

Given Operators have also historically cannibalized data connectivity for voice connection in a given network cell, do we think the situation will be any different this year? Any network planners out there in the readership?