Networks guru Andrew Odlyzko recently estimated that a typical mobile user consumes 20MB of data a month for voice service, but that T-Mobile Netherlands reports their iPhone users consuming 640MB of data a month; so upgrading everyone to the Jesus Phone would increase the demand for IP bandwidth on cellular networks by a factor of 30.
It had in the past been estimated that major European cellular operators might be able to provide 500MB/user/month without another wave of network upgrades; if this calculation is at all typical, it looks like there is a substantial risk of an ”iPlayer event” hitting cellular in the near future. Recap: when the BBC placed vast amounts of its content on the Internet through its iPlayer service, DSL traffic in the UK spiked; or rather, it didn’t spike, the trend shifted permanently upwards.
That, of course, is much more worrying; because the marginal costs are set by the capacity needed to handle the peaks, a rise in average traffic means a boost to costs multiplied by the peak/mean ratio. An aggravating factor is the pricing structure for BT Wholesale backhaul service - the commits are 155Mbits/s, so if the new peak demand just exceeded your existing commit, you needed to buy a whole 155Mbits/s pipe. The impact on the UK unbundling/bitstream ISPs has been serious and the sector remains in a critical condition.
Traditionally, a mobile base station was provisioned with 2 E-1 leased lines, 2×2 Mbit/s capacity. There are 2,419,200 seconds in a month. Multiplied by 4, that’s 9,676,800 Mbits in a month. Divide by 1024 to convert to MB, that’s 9,450 MB/9.4GB a month. Which means that a typical cell site could support at the most 14 users, or quite a lot less when you consider the peak/mean issue; clearly, those operators who have had the foresight to pull fibre to the base stations and, especially, to acquire their own infrastructure will be at a major advantage.
Click here to read more about the iPlayer, the iPhone, Iliad, and the infrastructure consequences of user interfaces
Read the complete post at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Telco20/~3/rrd2ADgaHW4/on_the_nature_and_causes_of_th.html
Posted
03-27-2009 5:41 AM
by
Telco 2.0