Mobile network capacity to dwindle globally in 2012, says report

By Bankole Orimisan

THE capacity crunch plaguing mobile operators around the world are expected to worsen in 2012, a study by Arieso has stated.

  This, according to the report, is fuelled by new smartphones, applications and services which are accelerating consumer demand for mobile data beyond expectations. As such, only one per cent of global subscribers consume half of all downloaded data. With increased sophisticated devices making their way into the market, the study found that capacity crunch would continue to be a thing of worry to mobile network operators globally.

  The Chief Technology Officer, Arieso and the author of the study, Dr. Michael Flanagan, said, “The introduction of increasingly sophisticated devices, coupled with growing consumer demand, is creating unrelenting pressure on mobile networks. The capacity crunch is still a very real threat for mobile operators, and it looks set to only get harder in 2012.

  “The mobile industry needs new investment and new approaches to boost network performance and manage the customer experience”.

  The Arieso study compared data usage across a variety of smartphones and connected devices. It found that users of the iPhone 4S demanded three times as much data as iPhone 3G users and twice as much as iPhone 4 users, who were identified as the most demanding in the 2010 study.

  In a finding consistent with 2010 results, it also showed that Google Nexus One users made twice as many data calls as iPhone 3G users. The Arieso analysis compared the data consumption of users of the latest smartphones against the iPhone3G as a “normalised benchmark”. The study found that different users and different devices exhibited very different demands on the network. The most significant change in consumer behaviour between 2010 and 2011 data has been catalysed by the introduction of the iPhone 4S. iPhone 4S users download 2.76 times as much data as users of the iPhone 3G. And while an Android-powered device maintains last year’s position at the top of the table for uplink data volumes, with HTC Desire S users typically uploading 3.23 times as much data as iPhone 3G users, the iPhone 4S falls just behind in this category with a typical 3.20 times as much data uploaded.

There are some very hungry handset users, even compared to the iPhone 3G benchmark (iPhone 3G = 100 per cent) For instance, data calls per subscriber on HTC Google Nexus One is 221 per cent, Sony Ericsson Xperia X10i 157 per cent and HTC Desire 156 per cent.