Curly: You know what the secret of life is?
Mitch: No, what?
Curly: This.
Mitch: Your finger?
Curly: One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don’t mean shit.
- City Slickers
At the CTIA I.T. & Entertainment show in San Diego this year, the cellular industry seemed to have one thing on its collective mind; capacity.
The Data Tsunami Is Here, reported MocoNews:
- AT&T’s CTO Jon Donovan said data traffic on AT&T’s network has jumped 5,000 percent over the past 12 quarters. Wireless packet data has grown 18 times in the last two and a half years while voice merely doubled, he said.
- AT&T’s Ralph de la Vega said more regulation will only stifle innovation: “We believe in an open internet and a mobile internet that is free of regulation. We want to be part of constructive dialogue.
- Verizon’s CTO advocates for metered broadband pricing. CTO Dick Lynch told press and attendees at at fiber-to-the-home industry conference in Houston that broadband service providers “cannot continue to grow the Internet without passing the cost on to someone. Verizon expects orders of magnitude increases in traffic on their 4G network in the next couple of years.
- Qualcomm said offloading traffic via WiFi or dedicated video networks like Qualcomm’s MediaFLO might help with future congestion
- One Openwave analyst said one smartphone equals 30 feature phones on a network, and one netbook or aircard equals 450 feature phones.
- The CTIA released a survey, finding that wireless data revenues made up more than 25 percent of all revenues and that there are more than 40 million official smartphones and 10 million other devices being used in the U.S. The CTIA wants the FCC to supply an additional 800 mhz of bandwidth by 2015.
- FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski acknowledged more spectrum was needed. “The FCC, in recent years, has authorized a threefold increase in spectrum. The problem is that some anticipate a thirtyfold increase in traffic.”
- Metered billing is not inevitable says DSL Reports, amid proposals from some writers to charge $10 a month for each 100 MB as a possible solution. But, “the cost of collecting charges on each transaction, both in real terms for the operator and the user and in dissuading total demand by increasing marginal costs…makes [metering] too expensive,” say other industry observers.
A Cisco Mobile Forecast for 2008-2013 noted that a single high-end data phone today generates more data traffic than 30 basic-feature cell phones, while a single laptop air card generates more data traffic than 450 basic-feature cell phones. Cisco projects that mobile data traffic will increase a thousand-fold over the seven years from 2005 through 2012, with video being a significant component.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has estimated it would cost $5 billion to $10 billion to wire the nation’s “anchor institutions” with fiber-optic cable.
The Seattle-based charity filed an analysis to the Federal Communications Commission on Oct. 5, estimating how much it would cost to install fiber-optic lines at about 123,000 hospitals, public libraries, public schools and community colleges. The study focused on bringing high-speed Internet connections to urban, suburban and rural communities.
Broadband.gov overviews initiatives intended to accelerate broadband deployment across the United States.
Related Dailywireless articles include; Genachowski: Faster Tower Approval, Open Platforms, Smartphones: Data Tsunami Coming, AT&T Makes Jump to HSDPA Speed, AT&T: HSPA+ Not LTE for Now, LTE Marketing Ramps Up, Sweden Tests LTE, Verizon LTE: 30 US Markets by 2010, Verizon Updates 700MHz LTE Specs, WHERE on T-Mobile’s Web2go, AT&T Adding 25,000 Hotspots Overseas, Future Bleak for WiMAX?, Movies on Demand for Motorola and iPhone, ABI: Cellular Data Too Expensive, The Death Of Paid WiFi, The App Store: Year One Revolution, The iPhone: A 2nd Economy?, Verizon: Free WiFi with DSL/FiOS, Mobile Supercomputing, Sweden Tests LTE, Verizon LTE: 30 US Markets by 2010, Verizon Calls on LTE, AWS: It’s Done, 700MHz: It’s Done!,
