Amdocs, a company you’ve probably never heard that’s used throughout the world by top tier operators as their customer billing backend, surveyed 30 wireless operators and asked them how data usage is impacting their network. An astonishing 60% said that they’re experiencing data congestion, that is there are frankly too many bits in the air and users have to sit and wait for things to finish downloading, and 20% say it’s so severe that it’s impacting their brand reputation. We’ve heard this before from infrastructure provider Nokia Siemens Networks, who said that customers no longer care about who has the cheapest monthly rate, but instead elect to go with the operator who has the best network.
Bandwidth hogs, people who use up more than their fair share of a network’s capacity, make up less than 3% of the population, but they consume almost a third of network resources. They pose such a threat that a staggering 97% of operators have said that they’re going to upgrade their networks with ethernet backhaul to handle this data explosion. In other words they’re going to connect all the cell towers to a central hub via plain old cable. The trouble is designing such networks and then deploying them, because while it sounds as easy as plugging in your coffee bean grinder, the work involved is so complex that I’m not even going to pretend that I understand it.
At the end of the day, I welcome this crisis. If operators were so ill prepared to cope with what happens when devices start hitting the market that can actually be fun ad easy to use, then growing pains were merely an inevitable part of growing up. With all the new high end LTE infrastructure coming out, ARM releasing processors are about as fast as computer 5 years ago, governments demanding that there be a nationwide broadband policy, all the key ingredients are there for a huge spike in network capacity.