By Marc Lippe, Director, Worldwide Field and Corporate Marketing, Infovista
Recently, Analysys Mason analysts Rupert Wood and Terry Norman led a webinar on future data traffic trends and the big picture across fixed and mobile. According to the analysts, trends currently developing in the industry will more than likely decrease Internet traffic rather than increase it. They noted that Internet traffic is largely driven (75%) by the amount of data that consumers access in their daily lives. And although the majority of it is video-based, with services like YouTube, Hulu and Netflix growing in terms of per capita usage, total traffic has remained fairly static, primarily as a result of the growth in mobile traffic.
Mobile, or small screen, traffic is likely to overcome traffic from fixed connections, displacing the growing amount of traffic across the Internet. So with more and more consumers moving their data connections from being plugged into the wall to basically anywhere else, what does this mean for mobile operators? With an increasing number of subscribers moving their daily Internet activity to mobile networks, how will mobile operators handle this influx?
As Chris Waters mentioned in his recent blog post, service performance assurance will be more important than ever for mobile network operators to maintain a high quality, functioning network. Performance assurance offers wireless mobile operators the ability to view the capacity and current functions of their mobile networks, end to end, and thus provision bandwidth and proactively manage potential network degradation. Without mobile service quality and network performance assurance, wireless SPs might require billions of dollars to improve their mobile network infrastructure, in combination with offerings continually decreasing in quality.
