Hard facts about the effects of the data crunch on mobile networks are hard to come by. Reports vary about how serious the impact is today, what is causing it and what service providers can do to deal with it.

With this in mind, we set out to uncover the facts, directly asking service providers these questions. We found some surprising results, some geographic trends and established the range of strategies being adopted to address the issue. What the industry told us is happening today

We conducted a series of short video interviews with key industry players to find out how they see the current situation. Telefónica O2 told us that their data traffic has been doubling every six months; Sky TV told us that some 80% of their video content is consumed over Wi-Fi; Amdocs quoted several specific analyst growth predictions.

What network planners revealed about the seriousness of the data capacity crunch

The people who know best about today’s network capacity issues are surely those responsible for planning where and when to invest in expansion and upgrades.

We commissioned an independent survey from Telesperience, who interviewed 30 network planners from mobile operators around the world to establish the current state of the industry. The survey confirmed the seriousness of the data capacity crunch, identified some regional trends as to the causes and established some priorities to deal with them.

The findings were stark:

• The capacity crunch is real – Almost two-thirds of the network experts we spoke to reported that they are already experiencing negative effects from the crunch in their networks.
• There is a revenue gap – the capacity crunch is not just an engineering problem: it is also a business problem.
• There is a capacity gap – even if Service Providers had unlimited budgets to provide extra capacity there will still be a short to mid-term gap before the next generation of network technologies can be deployed.

What strategies do analysts propose?

Telesperience took the data survey a step further, using their wide industry knowledge combined with further input from network planners to describe the range of strategies being adopted to deal with the issue. Key points from the research report include:

• Mobile networks have different challenges to fixed networks – much of the discussion of the capacity crunch talks about the challenge of managing overall data growth across all networks. It is important to understand that some of the challenges presented by the capacity crunch are specific to mobile networks.
• The capacity crunch is highly complex and there is no easy fix – the effects of the crunch are numerous and impact across operational boundaries.
• Within the crunch are opportunities – those Service Providers that are able to manage the crunch more effectively will be able to gain competitive advantage over rivals that choose less effective strategies.

10 Ways to deal with the Data Capacity Crunch

Amdocs believe that there is no single strategy to solve the issue. Service providers will need to make their own selection from a wide range of technical and marketing approaches. In the near future, these different mixes will begin differentiate the customer experience from different service providers and start a new era in competition for the telecommunications industry.

Building more capacity won’t solve the problem on its own. Complementary strategies such as data offload, optimization and pricing will also be required.

These major strategies open to service providers have been documented in the white paper “10 Ways to Deal with the Capacity Crunch”

Hear Amdocs’ views on the capacity crunch

You can listen to this short (10 minute) audio podcast below which discusses Amdocs’ view on the capacity crunch and highlights vital actions for service providers seeking to combat its effects. David Chambers, Solutions Marketing Director at Amdocs OSS Division, believes that the crunch is not just about how many gigabytes or terabytes of data a network is carrying or can carry. What’s important for customers is whether their service is working adequately. This is a really important point, since it’s easy for service providers to become preoccupied with the engineering aspects of the data crunch (such as building more capacity and managing network quality) and to underestimate the impact of the business and customer aspects (such as changing customer behavior, better monetization of capacity and QoS, and the impact of bottlenecks and poor QoS on the customers’ use of services).

But it's not just handling the growing volume of data traffic which are causing headaches for service providers today. They are also grappling with the need to rollout new technology, new services and new capacity faster than before. Read on to learn how they are dealing with the issue of Time to Market.