Mobile operators need to push handset firms to make more bandwidth-efficient devices, says Alcatel-Lucent Asia-Pacific chief Rajeev Singh-Molares.
Alcatel-Lucent sees a potential 16 times increase in data traffic over the next five years. “And depending on how aggressive your set of assumptions is, that could be as high as a 40 times increase by 2015.”
Hong Kong operator CSL has seen a 47 times increase in data traffic since it launched HSPA+ 18 months ago. CSL CIO Peter Smith says usage could jump by another 50 times in the next five years. Telefonica O2 in the UK expects data traffic to double every six months.
With that level of increased usage, Singh-Molares said the use of LTE, offloads such as Wi-Fi and femotcells, and IP network upgrades would only mitigate the problem.
He said handset-makers and apps developers need to be more concerned about how efficiently apps run on mainstream devices. “Certain devices grab onto network capacity and hang onto it longer than they should. Simply altering the design of the device can impact the efficiency.”
He noted that the difference in efficiency levels between devices can be enormous.
A phone consumes both signaling capacity as well as actual data traffic. The design of the application affects how often and much signaling capacity is required and in many cases can be improved to reduce the network impact, explained Rasmus Hellberg from Qualcomm.
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