Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Mobile bandwidth crunch causing concern for innovation, extra pay

By Jim Schakenbach, Special to Mass High Tech

So you’re the proud new owner of one of the cool new Droid phones. You’re ready to rock the 4G world with blazingly fast downloads, real-time navigation — heck, even old-school phone calls. You fire up your state-of-the-art smart device, and wait, and wait.

You’ve just fallen victim to the growing mobile-bandwidth crunch. A simple, immutable fact of physics that proves with the explosive growth of smart-device use, there’s still only a limited radio-frequency spectrum that can be used — what we call “bandwidth.”

To be sure, there is still room left in the spectrum, but much of it is reserved for other uses. The Federal Communications Commission controls non-federal usage and has been working to reallocate increasing amounts of bandwidth for consumer and business mobile communications, but demand is increasing exponentially.

“We’ve seen unprecedented demand on the data side over the past four years,” said AT&T vice president and general manager for New England, Steve Krom. “There’s definitely going to be a need for more spectrum as well as more efficient technologies.”

“Consumers and business professionals have an insatiable appetite for bandwidth,” said Bob Egan, managing director and chief analyst for Cambridge-based mobile industry market research and advisory firm Sepharim Group. “As we get more sophisticated mobile phones, we’re doing more things with them. Four years ago, people primarily talked on their phones. Now they’re using mapping applications, buying things ... looking at videos, watching television, and playing games. Demand for bandwidth will continue to more than triple, year after year.”

Bandwidth issues can cause headaches even for mobile industry companies that may not rely strictly on mobile, such as Boston’s Apperian Inc., a mobile-application management company that helps other companies develop and deliver multiplatform mobile apps. According to CEO David Patrick, bandwidth crunch causes headaches for Apperian because the company provides a cloud-based hosting service and needs to use all pipelines effectively so its customers, in turn, can build, deploy and manage mobile apps. “Bandwidth issues just accentuate the problem for us, because you’re trying to get applications and content delivered through a patchwork of wireless, wired, and cable channels. So a core competency has to be the ability to build apps that adjust to available bandwidth,” said Patrick.

What many people don’t realize is that the available bandwidth problem is being compounded by the rapid growth of machine-to-machine (M2M) communications that use wireless technology as all or part of its communication process — things such as remote equipment relaying status updates to a home office and truck fleets transmitting location and condition reports.

“Over the next decade machines are going to play an extremely important role in the whole bandwidth conversation,” said Dale Calder, founder of Axeda Corp. in Foxborough, a cloud platform provider for connected products and M2M applications. “I don’t think many people have come to grips with that yet. There may be 3 billion smartphones, but there are 50 billion machines — and machines are damn chatty.”

As a result, the various forces are marshaling resources to combat the growing problem, and not without some controversy or complaints. Carriers such as AT&T are moving away from unlimited data plans to pay-as-you-go to better address consumers’ bandwidth appetite. While some wireless industry experts warn that usage-sensitive pricing will stymie rather than accommodate usage and perhaps even stunt mobile application innovation, AT&T doesn’t see it as an issue.

“With our current tiered pricing strategy, we’re not penalizing the 95 percent of users who are under 2 gigabits of usage,” said AT&T’s Krom. “For that 5 percent of users over 2 gigates, we have moderately priced plans to accommodate them. The advent of tiered pricing really hasn’t slowed down use at all.”

Most experts agree that a major part of the solution will be more wi-fi networks and femtocells — small, cellular base stations for residential or small-business use that support multiple devices and connects them to a network via wired broadband service.

“We need to attack the bandwidth problem from several different avenues,” said Egan. “First, obviously, is getting as much of the spectrum as we can get our hands on. Second, use that increased spectrum in better, smarter ways, such as compression. Third, get better antenna designs that enable operators within a given spectrum to layer in different sub-areas of coverage, such as femtocells, microcells, and nanocells. Fourth, is making mobile-application protocols that are smarter and use less bandwidth.”

From a carrier’s perspective, Krom is not “concerned about today, tomorrow, or next month. What I’m concerned about is the future. That’s why we’re talking about LTE deployment (4G technology), fiber to the cell site, wi-fi, and the acquisition of T-Mobile — it’s what we need to stay ahead of demand.”

Egan said it boils down to cost and convenience.

“Part of it’s going to be a trade-off between quantity of information, the transport of it, and convenience for the consumer,” Egan said. “There’s no question about it, though, it’s going to be a wireless world.”

 

Jim Schakenbach is a freelance writer in Jefferson.