Enterprise Mobility from the Telecom Carrier perspective

Monday, January 25th, 2010 Marcio Avillez, VP Network Offerings

Some of my iPass colleagues will be discussing some of the key trends around mobility and how they are impacting the enterprise and the IT/Telecom manager’s jobs. I will focus my attention on key trends in the telecom carrier space and try to look ahead and synthesize some of the implications for the enterprise mobility.

From my perspective the most relevant trend in the mobility world is the increased availability and growing adoption of devices that have the ability to use the mobile internet – PCs with mobile data cards and smartphones/superphones. These devices support much more than e-mail and they are driving increased data traffic on mobile networks at a dizzying pace – Morgan Stanley estimates that mobile data traffic on wireless networks will grow at a 131% compound annual growth rate between 2008 and 2013. In summary, the combination of devices, mobile data networks and applications is already combining to strain the capability of many of these networks to handle the traffic loads in some markets or at certain times of the day and the problem is likely to get worse before it gets better.

Nothing new here, we’ve all heard about this impact on the mobile networks. So why should I care about this? Well, the answer is that, beyond the obvious short-term performance implications and potential productivity impacts to mobile professionals, there is also another potential implication for how enterprises procure these services.

Let me explain a bit further. . .

It’s not that there aren’t technological solutions to address this issue and ameliorate the situation over time. The reality is that there are a growing set of options that mobile network operators are pursuing, with several strategies and investment programs to address the issue. The real issue is where the bottleneck presents itself.

Mobile networks are a combination of radio networks and landline networks. The radio networks use the spectrum (that a mobile carrier owns rights to) as a medium to transmit data from PCs with mobile data cards and smartphones/superphones to radio towers. Morgan Stanley estimates that there are ~250,000 of these cell site towers in the US. These cell site towers that house the radio equipment are then connected to the internet over a combination of technologies that today includes multiple T1s , microwave and, in some cases, via fiber.

This is where the bottleneck lies. Most carriers have enough bandwidth and spectrum in most locations on their radio network to handle this increase in traffic between the devices and the cell towers. However, few of the ~250,000 cell sites in the US can say the same about the landline network that connects them to the internet. Industry analysts estimate that mobile carriers are going to be playing catch-up on this front through 2012-2013.

See how this bottleneck can impact the Enterprise, in Part 2, tomorrow.