Jonathan Christensen eBay Skype division general manager, says “the phone is dead," arguing that VoIP over mobiles will accelerate the trend. Agree or disagree, mobile network operators,will face issues other than loss of lucrative long distance calling revenues and bandwidth consumption, as the "VoIP over mobile" trend gathers speed.
As it turns out, says Mike Schabel, Alcatel-Lucent general manager, bandwidth consumption isn't the only problem mobile networks face, and in some ways may not be the key problem posed by IP applications.
Consider Session Initiation Protocol. As SIP applications start to represent more of any mobile user’s total usage, the problems become evident. Ignoring for a moment the revenue implications, SIP-based applications present previously-unacknowledged issues. The reason is that although SIP-based voice and communications are not a terribly big consumer of bandwidth, they are a huge consumer of radio network signaling resources. And it is radio network contention that is the gating problem, in some ways, not bandwidth consumption.
Where a typical user might place most of the bandwidth load on the radio network by using Web browsing, P2P and WAP applications (and where SIP bandwidth is negligible), the signaling load is highly disproportionate.
Where HTTP use might represent 44 percent of total bandwidth use, and consume 1.3 hours of airtime, while imposing 240 signaling events, a SIP application might chew up 3.9 hours of airtime and 2,240 signaling events despite using just 0.02 percent of total bandwidth.
Likewise, a VPN connection might represent just 2.4 percent of bandwidth consumed, but represent 20.75 hours of airtime, while imposing 5,970 signaling events.
So the problem for a mobile network provider is not simply a cannibalization of current revenue, but dramatically-more-intense pressure on the radio access network. And the issue isn't bandwidth: it is signaling overhead that chews up radio network element capacity, even when bandwidth is hardly used.
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