By
Telecom Lead Team: By 2016 U.S. end users will, on average,
consume about 2.6 GB of mobile data per month, according to iGR research.
The
research claims that mobile/cellular data usage will greatly increase over the
next few years, driven by ongoing LTE rollouts and the increasing adoption of
mobile devices.
iGR’s
new report presented a model, localized U.S. Bandwidth Demand
Forecast, 2011-2016 that considers data consumption by time of day and
geographic location, forecasting the severity of the problem that mobile
operators face today and moving forward.
The
model indicates that bandwidth consumption exceeds the average of what the
macro network can currently handle and indicates, despite the availability of
LTE, that the problem will only get worse.
“Exceeding
bandwidth demand is a multi-dimensional problem that can be evaluated by both
time and geography. How much bandwidth — over and above what is already
planned — might an operator have to deliver per kilometer squared (KM2) per
hour to meet the bandwidth demand that their macro network cannot deliver,”
said iGR President Iain Gillott.
The
iGR research suggests the unmet bandwidth demand problem could grow nearly 200
hundred times by 2016.
Additionally, iGR’s
research suggests that significant “pain-points” will emerge in the
cellular data network that will necessitate a different approach to network
architecture, in short, the heterogeneous network.
The
research also said that in all markets, there is higher demand for mobile
services during the workday and, typically, in a much more concentrated area.
In
its earlier research, iGR forecast that for the heaviest users of WiFi in the home, total bandwidth
used is expected to increase from more than 390 GB per month in 2011 to nearly
440 GB per month in 2015.
