There is no shortage of forecasts for increased mobile usage by U.S. consumers during the next several years. From Mary Meeker’s latest Internet Trends report, to studies released by Business Insider and Infonetics, industry pundits claim that network providers need to start preparing now for dramatic spikes in network traffic. Take a look at the recent Cisco VNI, for instance, which indicates that global IP traffic will reach 131.9 exabytes per month by 2018 –which is the equivalent of transporting 45 million DVDs on the network every hour.
What’s driving the increased amount of IP traffic?
If you think that mobile video alone is responsible for the surge, think again. As outlined recently by EdgeConneX, emerging technologies such as improved voice recognition programs in cars and on smartphones—as well as increased mobile syncing and sharing of emails, video and audio files across multiple devices—are creating larger data streams. At the same time, cars equipped with hands-free interfaces will make downloads of high-bandwidth applications like maps and music players a lot easier for the user, while making it tougher on the networks to handle the demand.
And there are more challenges on the horizon. Many of today’s top cellular phone providers are offering upwards of 16 to 64 GBs of storage capacity on smartphones. They are giving away tablets to customers or charging a nominal monthly fee while providing a Gig of free data on shared data plans. Simultaneously, smart phones are being used to tether PCs and tablets for Internet access to accommodate the increasingly mobile marketplace. More people are using smartwatches and fitness monitors, which are capable of streaming data uploads and report downloads to cloud sites. The Internet-savvy public is quickly embracing smart home technologies, which enables remote monitoring and sending of commands to home security systems and home automation devices. Furthermore, smart phones are getting smarter.
This is already evident with Amazon’s new phones, which offer features like scanning, shopping, and free photo backup service to the cloud as well as access to on-demand customer support. Mobile gaming will account for increased data usage as well. As processor and software upgrades improve the user experience, this could lead to heavier adoption of multi-player games.
Why does this spell trouble for network providers?
Long-haul networks were not designed for the data demands from today’s influx of gadgets, applications, smartphones and other devices. Sending massive amounts of IP packets in real time to and from mobile devices over long distances can result in network overloads, not to mention rising transport/peering costs of supporting millions of simultaneous HD and 4K content streams. At the same time, today’s consumers have come to expect limited lag time and lightning-fast results. Legacy infrastructure simply cannot support today’s expectations of a high-quality, data-rich user experience.
What is the solution?
The only way to overcome this problem is to localize content at the edge of the network, thus reducing the number of times content needs to be requested in any given metro area where a power-dense Edge Data Center exists. By caching content locally, a single end user’s request will provide that unique content to all other users with that request in a given geography. With this new paradigm, backbone delays and peering congestion will become a thing of the past. Users will benefit from faster content delivery, optimized availability and a higher quality experience.
Edited by
Alisen Downey