The one duty we owe to history is to re-write it - Oscar Wilde
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Mobile broadband is ushering in the net apocalypse
THE SECRETARY GENERAL of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has warned that smartphone adoption is so great that it will crush the Internet and create a serious bottleneck in communications if nothing is done to support it.
Dr Hamadoun Touré said that unless fibre rollout is sped up and spectrum availability improved smartphone data will overwhelm networks, and he recommended that operators act now and fast to avoid future problems.
Smartphones are already consuming more than five times the data of ordinary phones, he said, and will rise from a current user base of 500 million today to almost two billion in 2015. According to Touré, although some operators are already doing something about this, many of them are failing.
"Mobile operators have been investing billions to upgrade and improve the capacity and performance of their networks, but in some high-usage cities, such as San Francisco, New York and London, we are still seeing users frustrated by chronic problems of network unavailability," he said.
"Robust National Broadband Plans that promote extra spectrum and the faster roll-out of the fibre networks which are essential to mobile backhaul are vital to support the growing number of data-intensive applications."
He commended the US and UK for being better prepared than other countries and he called on the rest to follow their lead and increase the use of fibre as well as releasing spectrum allocations.
Currently responses have been mixed and include a range of measures including increased investment in WiFi networks as well as plans to drive individual users onto personal femtocell devices and tiered pricing that penalises the heaviest users. µ
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Here in Australia the government is building a fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) national broadband network (NBN) to cover 96% of homes in this vast sprawling continent.
Of course, the narrowminded and powerhungry opposition is doing and saying everything they can to tip the balance of the *minority* government - including opposition to a government-built broadband network.
Today Australia's biggest telco (originally a government monopoly corporation) announced upgrades to the country's best 3.5G network (Telstra NextG) to LTE in major cities only starting at the end of the year and the Opposition is already claiming that the NBN is a waste of taxpayer money when more people are jumping on the wireless bandwagon and improving wireless technology funded by private enterprise will do the job.
This article highlights potential inadequacy of *only* relying on a wireless 4G network and provides valuable evidence supporting the continued construction of a fibre-optic based wired national network.
The running joke in the UK is that if you want to use data on O2 (the original iphone partner) you wait until after 4pm when all the iphones have gone flat. You've then got a couple of hours before they get home and find the charger.