Signaling is the Issue for Smartphones, Bandwidth for PC Dongle Connections

Nearly everybody has an issue with data bandwidth from time to time, at some locations, at some times of day, experienced as sluggish response times, inability to make a connection, or a dropped connection.

In part, that is because only 15 percent of mobile cell sites handle about half of all traffic. If you happen to be in one of those cells at the time of peak load on a weekday, you might encounter congestion. It isn't so much that the "whole network" isn't properly designed, but rather than demand is concentrated at a relatively small number of sites. No matter how much bandwidth a network has, in aggregate, it will be limited in terms of how much bandwidth it can make available in a single coverage area, at one point in time.

Nor is the only problem bandwidth demand. The peak data usage is driven by data cards and embedded laptops, and relatively secondarily by smartphones. But signaling load is an issue as well. In fact, it is more likely that smartphone signaling will cause congestion of radio assets than actual bandwith demand, says Chetan Sharma, mobile analyst.

In fact, signaling traffic is growing faster than the raw data traffic due to smartphones, as they are not very efficient with application signaling, Sharma says.

The smartphone signaling is over eight times as intensive as data card signaling traffic, and signaling consumes over 50 percent of the available network resources.

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