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By
Tim Young
It’s getting mighty crowded out there.
I don’t mean crowded with people (though I’m sure any US citizen who was foolish enough to set out on post-Thanksgiving shopping trips would SWEAR that the world population had quintupled since the day before), as that would be another conversation for another time and another publication.
It’s the network that’s getting crowded. In the past few years, we’ve seen an explosion of mobile data usage, especially in the wireless sector. Consumers have been offered more and more services over rapidly growing networks, and have consistently come back to ask for more and ever more.
It’s gotten to the point that some carriers are shying away from talking about the challenges of bandwidth demands. After widely publicizing the massive growth their mobile data offerings have seen over the last few years, AT&T has gotten uncharacteristically tight-lipped about their data explosion (several AT&T execs mentioned a 5000% growth of mobile data usage between 2006 and 2009).
Therefore, the question remains: How are service providers meeting customer demands for more and more bandwidth-hungry services?
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Consumers have been offered more and more services over rapidly growing networks, and have consistently come back to ask for more and ever more. |
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Furthermore, with an ever-growing list of bandwidth-hungry smartphones and netbooks shipping every day, new bandwidth addicts are being created all the time. We’ve seen user behavior change when subscribers get their hands on a device that they can really use in new and interesting ways. That means more bandwidth usage.
In addition, Debra Lewis of Verizon Wireless recently told Pipeline that in Q3 ’09, “customers sent and received more than 153 Billion text messages and nearly 3 billion
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To understand that question, we need to understand the problem.
Customers are using more bandwidth than ever before, especially on the wireless side. I’ve seen multiple figures that point to the severity of the issue, but one that has stuck with me is that the average smartphone uses some 30 times as much data as a typical web-enabled, but otherwise traditional, handset. However, the average laptop/netbook with wireless broadband access can tear through nearly 450 times the amount of data as a traditional handset. That’s one powerful appetite.
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picture/video messages -- both up from the previous quarter and the year-ago quarter.” That’s an awful lot of messages. In addition, Lewis told us that users crossed “50B SMS in a month for the first time ever -- well more than many of our competitors and showing how our customers are using their phones for data.” Lewis also noted nearly 40 million song and video downloads via Verizon’s V CAST service during that same quarter.
And the increased data use is a financial boon, too. Lewis notes that, also in Q309, “$4.1
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