Worldwide mobile data bandwidth usage has grown 30 percent during the second quarter of 2009, says Allot Communications. Asia leads the growth with 36 percent; Europe posted 28 percent growth and the Americas 25 percent.
Heavy data users do not distinguish between their fixed and their mobile networks and seem to expect the same service from the Internet, irrespective of their access method, the report says.
That is going to be a problem, for the same reason a small percentage of heavy users create performance issues for all other users, one might reasonably conclude. The other issue is that the fastest-growing traffic type is streaming video, which grew 58 percent during the quarter. Since streaming video requires 100 times the bandwidth of a voice call, you can imagine what the problem is.
The other issue is that mobile traffic is not evenly distributed: some locations get dramatically more demand than others. Peer-to-peer traffic, for example, accounts for 42 percent of bandwidth utilization in the busiest cells on the network, but only 21 percent in the average cell.
Since mobile licenses are awarded in ways that mean usable bandiwidth in any one location is limited, fancier engineering, higher network cost and more-sophisticated traffic engineering are required at some cell sites, though others might manage just fine.
No comments:
Post a Comment