BBC: Mobile carriers won't be able to keep up with demand for data

Imagine having to try two or three times to connect to the internet from your smartphone, or having dropped calls occur three or four times as frquently as they now take place. These are some of the problems that smartphone owners might run into by 2016 according to the latest report by Deloitte and repeated by the BCC.

Besides these problems, smartphone users will see their phone freeze more often and data speeds could drop under 1 Mbps for a fairly long period of time. Speeds that low make video streaming fairly impossible and could make using the internet in general pretty tough. The report says that demand for data will outdo supply over the next few years with major deterioration in user-experience in some metropolitan regions.

Apple iPhone, Android and Windows Phone users consume 35 times more data than users of typical phones according to the report, although we're not quite sure what handsets Deloitte considers "typical." By 2016, wireless traffic will grow by 50 times. This will lead to "rush hours" with congested mobile pipelines for smartphone users. Luckily, some governments saw this bottleneck coming and sold off spectrum to keep the data flowing. But some governments put restrictions on the spectrum they auctioned off, requiring that carriers use all or part of it to serve rural areas where getting a cellphone signal is hard to do. More efficient 4G networks will ease some of the pressure on the carriers. Besides that, there seems to be no immediate answer to the problems that carriers might face in the not too distant future.

source: Deloitte via   BBC via textually.org