4G Americas Paper Targets The Wireless Capacity Crunch

The ability of a mobile network’s capacity to keep pace with demand is diminishing. A new white paper from 4G Americas and member companies analyses the challenges and solutions posed to wireless operators.

As pretty much everyone in the wireless industry knows, a major problem facing wireless operators today is network congestion. The success of smartphones and now tablets means that both data and signaling traffic are overloading wireless networks. Whether it’s data-intensive music and video downloads or signaling-intensive social networking and messaging applications, the ability of a mobile network’s capacity to keep pace with demand is diminishing.

The heart of the issue is that a circuit-switched network designed primarily for voice service is in the process of transforming itself into a packet-switched network capable of supporting high-bandwidth data services and the always-on Internet model.

To help analyze the ongoing “capacity crunch,” CommScope has joined with other 4G Americasmember companies in authoring a new white paper titled “Optimizing the Mobile Application Ecosystem.” This paper analyses the phenomenal growth in data usage, identifies the challenges posed to wireless operators, and suggests how this problem could be addressed.

It calls for a concentrated effort that includes not only the operators, but other actors in the wireless eco-system such as vendors, regulators, and application developers. Proposed solutions include optimization and expansion of existing networks, optimizing applications to maximize spectrum utilization and efficiency, and planning for newer technology deployment including access to additional spectrum.

Use the link to access the paper, and feel free to leave me a comment with your thoughts about how to handle the data and signaling explosion going on in the wireless world.