In Smartphones and tablet sales are growing like mad. Each of these mobile devices is using more rich media. The wireless operators are facing a tsunami in the growing demand for wireless data. It's like they are standing on the beach, holding an iPhone and iPad, and looking up to see a wall of white water moving toward shore and thinking, "I wonder what's causing that?"
The operators have a number of very smart people who study network demand. They all know the tsunami is about to hitand hit very hard. As a result, many of them are looking for creative ways to offload the demand until they can build more advanced 4G networks that can hopefully keep up with users' appetite to send and receive videos, photos, animations and music.
The cause for the tsunami in wireless data demands is quite easy to understand. According to a forecast from Frost & Sullivan on the growth of share of smartphones (as a percentage of all phones shipped in North America from 2009 through 2015), the smartphone share of mobile handset subscribers is expected to rise from 23.9 percent in 2009 to 67.1 percent in 2015. Thus, there is going to be a complete reversal in the percentages, with the more basic feature phones plummeting, from 66.3 percent down to 22.9 percent of all mobile handset subscribers.
Today's smartphones and tablets
Today, smartphones include wonderful still image capability, as well as high-definition movie capture and high-resolution displays that make it enjoyable to download all kinds of rich mediafrom e-mail messages to photos, music and videos. Thus, each new smartphone results in a 3x to 5x increase in the data communications demand.
But it doesn't stop there. Tablets are being purchased in the millions and they are an incremental new market for mobile users. Plus, each tablet user wants to see the news, weather, sports, books, magazines, music and videos. Thus, the use of rich media in tablets is even greater than in smartphones. That results in even more demand. Plus, the demand is only going to keep rising over time.
The operators are dealing with this by making it easier for subscribers to obtain the rich media they need by encouraging the use of Wi-Fi (in-home and out), as well as time-shifting the demand to the evening and night time when the network is at a very low utilization. For example, AT&T is building out supplemental Wi-Fi networks in a number of major, dense downtown areas such as San Francisco and New York. In the long term, the only real solution is going to come from allocating more wireless spectrum to mobile. President Obama called for just that in his recent State of the Union address. With some help from the FCC, operators will eventually be able to provide more 4G/5G services to hundreds of millions of subscribers who want to benefit from using their iPhones and iPads all day, every day.
That's going to take many years. In the meantime, you'll likely have to "plug into" hot spots to upload and download most of your rich media (such as videos).
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