Why cellphone bandwidth is running out (and what to do about it)

Conventional wisdom holds that we need to build more highways
in order to curb congestion. But what ends up happening is, more
highways encourage more driving, creating a Möbius strip of never-ending
highway building and even more entangled traffic jams. But there's only
so much room to build new highways, which means eventually we'll be
living in eternal gridlock.

The same Möbius strip of more capacity=more traffic is happening in cellphone land.













While wireless spectrum limitations have been a constant problem
since the early 1960s when car phones exploded in popularity, the iPhone
and its ilk ignited a seemingly unending cycle: speedier networks that
enable more data-hungry applications such as HTML Web browsing, photo
and video sharing, peer-to-peer game playing, GPS navigation, video
downloading, and video chatting — all of which necessitate the creation
of more capacious capacity, ad nauseam. But like highways, there's only
so much spectrum to carry our increasing wireless data loads.









According to cellular analyst Chetan Sharma,
we drew 20MB per month per user of wireless data in 2007. By the end of
this year, consumption will grow to a whopping 370MB/month/user. By
2014, we'll data suck an estimated 3 GB/month/user by 2014. This year,
U.S. data traffic is likely to exceed 1 Exabyte (EB) — that's 1
quintillion, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 1 billion gigabytes, or 1
million terabytes of data. It's a big number, no matter how you
delineate the zeros.

AT&T users in New York and San Francisco have already suffered
the consequences of too many users and not enough capacity — just
getting a connection was a hassle, much less a speedy, consistent one.

What to do? Since spectrum is finite, the best we can do is rearrange
existing and potential capacity. There are four parallel efforts
underway to help ease the load.

1. 4G


In the short-term, 4G will help since 4G networks
run in virgin spectrum recovered from analog TV, although AT&T and
Verizon are not as well positioned as Sprint in terms of bandwidth room.
But given the more capacity=more traffic rule, the new 4G will fill up
faster than 3G spectrum, and we'll be having this same conversation a
few years from now.


2. Curtail Our Usage


Last month, AT&T eliminated unlimited wireless data plans, hoping
this would encourage customers to curtail their usage and ease loads on
the network. Verizon is expected to make the same announcement any day
now.


3. Network Optimization


In addition to 4G, AT&T has spent billions to build new cell sites
and buttress its network "backhaul" — the network layer that connects
the cell towers to the core network infrastructure that handles session
management, call routing, and the connection to the internet and the
landline network — with Wi-Fi, in the hope of trying to soak up some of
the data load. A couple of months ago, AT&T announced both free
Wi-Fi access in Times Square, the latest in 20,000 Wi-Fi hotspots
AT&T has created to try and lay off data traffic from its network.


4. More Spectrum


Last month, President Obama announced an initiative to recover 500MHz of spectrum
from varying wireless nooks and crannies for wireless broadband use.
But spectrum allocations can take years to work their way through the
bureaucratic approval, auction and testing phases, and for new phones
that can access the new spectrum to get into the marketplace.

All of which is nice, but merely delays rather than solves the
problem. Given the short supply of spectrum and in the absence of a
long-term wireless strategy (maybe city/state/nationwide Wi-Fi networks
run like a government utility) from either carriers or the FCC, it will
likely take some sort of radio technology to create more space in a
fixed-sized room. Hopefully there'll be some sort of breakthrough before
we all get stuck on a gigantic wireless traffic jam.