WITH MOBILE DATA offloading expected to triple in the next five years, the traffic overloads starting to choke many mobile networks will only get worse, especially as smart phones and other mobile devices proliferate, predicts a new study from ABI Research.
The report Mobile Network Offloading says that while about 16% of mobile data is diverted from mobile networks today, that is expected to increase to 48% by 2015. But data traffic itself will have grown by a factor of 30, meaning that offloaded data will expand 100-fold.
Several approaches and technologies such as Wi-Fi, femtocells, mobile content delivery networks and media optimization will play specific roles in relieving network congestion, the report continues.
“Each of these offload and optimization technologies is aimed at solving a particular problem and they will all coexist”, said practice director Aditya Kaul. “Wi-Fi is effective in covering limited areas containing many users, such as transport stations and sports venues. A femtocell, in contrast, is a good solution for targeting small numbers of heavy data users. Mobile CDNs attack the problem of frequently-used content, for example a video that has ‘gone viral’, by caching the file locally rather than loading it onto the network for each download request.”
But media optimization – effectively improved compression – will grow the fastest and deliver the greatest traffic reduction of all these methods, the study predicts.
