RSSWill consumers be able to afford the bandwidth they're craving?
By Tim Conneally | Published May 22, 2009, 11:53 AM
The pocketable Internet has created an insatiable need for bandwidth. 18% of total Internet traffic in 2008 came from mobile devices, and it's only increasing. In fact, a national tier one mobile network operator (MNO) (that preferred to remain nameless) participated in Yankee Group research that recently projected its data consumption would grow by a factor of six in the next three years.
Here is what that means: In 1995, there were about 9,000 cell sites in the United States. Today, there are more than 228,000, or an average of 80 thousand new sites every five years. Each one of these sites serves about a thousand users, and the backhaul is provided mostly T1 and E1 lease lines, with an average of 3 T1's per site and an average bandwidth capacity of 4.62 megabits per second. The maximum speed is generally around 10 Mbps, and Yankee Group research showed that it cost MNOs about $6.1 billion to provide that much bandwidth in 2008.
But because Internet traffic is increasingly coming from mobile devices, and a larger base of users demands higher performance, the anonymous MNO expects that sites will have to provide more than 50 Mbps each going into 2011. If the current backhaul methods were to continue, in 2012, the total cost of mobile Internet backhaul could grow to more than $82 billion dollars.
"Linear growth is not an option." Said Yankee Group's Vice President of Enabling Technologies, Jennifer Pigg. "God Forbid you want 100 Mbps, you're talking about an equivalent of five thousand dollars per month per mile. GigE? Forget it, it'll cost you almost twenty times that much."
So as this demand is only increasing, mobile network operators are scrambling to implement a variety of strategies on the radio side to handle this flood of data. They need to increase their cell site density, and as we enter the 4G era, the traditional T1 infrastructure is just not going to be able to fulfill our demands.
"Backhaul is extremely problematic in the overall network, not RAN (radio access network), not radios, not the core network...it's the backhaul," said Pigg.
I think this opens up opportunity for there to be more companies that reduce the size of what's going across the links. We use the netArtera product and it reduces the impact of HTTP to our network between 15-30% and requires nothing installed on the end users device. This technology currently is being sold mostly to Satellite broadband users but I believe is something that will be needed everywhere very soon.
www.NetArtera.com
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|I don't think so since the way they inflate everything. There is no reason there shouldn't be this rip off bull s***. Of course washington won't s*** a bout it either gthey;]'er getting ther pockets full bot to do anything for US, the bas****s.
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|i think it is relevant to distinguish the multi billion dollars company/business/consumer from that of a person/consumer.
as long as there is bandwidth for sale and millions to be made from it, business's will pay to get a piece of the action or more.
further, the smarter business's will get their congressional representative to get it / pay for it and then have it handed over to them on a silver platter because of their generous campaign contributions.
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|Yes, in America you're boned because of the massive distances involved. In nice, small, developed countries like the UK... we won't spend money on it.
Bugger. We're boned too.
Perhaps its time someone invented wifi that works over massive distances and allows massive amounts of connections to it (i.e. IPv6)
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|I always wondered if were possible to have build-in micro transponders in automobiles and use those to help boost signals and bandwith. The more vehicles in an area, the higher frequency strength. The problem though is that this would require standardization, which gets pretty tricky.
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|The costs for wireless access infrastructure should start to come down as there is more competition and more volume. It would certainly seem that using some sort of wireless mesh network rather than landlines to each site.
There is a lot of corporate and academic effort going into wireless mesh networks to replace wired backhaul. Here are a couple of related items:
http://www.networkworld....ess-amplifier-ucsd.html
http://www.crn.com/netwo...FZG2QSNDLPCKH0CJUNN2JVN
http://articles.director...l_Approved-a885043.html
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