4G to the Rescue for Mobile Broadband Congestion?
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010Much has been said about how 4G will help overcome mobile broadband capacity issues. It will help, but will it be enough? That’s the question.
Web usage on mobile devices is on pace to double this year due to drivers such as “always on” social networking and bandwidth hungry video, the increased capabilities of phones and unlimited data plans. 4G network capacity may not be enough. Remember when 3G was set to solve the capacity problems of 2G? We can see from AT&T with the iPhone in the US and O2 in the UK, just to name a couple, that 3G capacity only goes so far. Besides the fact that we must service current 3G challenges, it will be only a matter of time before demand outstrips 4G capacity. Operators can reduce payload and make better use of network capacity through additional methods. One option is by taking advantage of in-network intelligence (as with Novarra’s Vision platform) to provide a quality web user experience while reducing over the air data transfer, in some cases as much as 90%. Also, by adding a network proxy, an operator can update or add services that are immediately available to the entire subscriber base by taking advantage of cloud-based computing.
More about this topic in an article for RCR by Novarra’s Randy Cavaiani:
Cloud Computing becoming de-facto mobile internet development approach
Tuesday, September 1st, 2009“Many, many applications can be delivered through the browser and what that does for our costs is stunning. We believe the web has won…” - Vic Gundotra, Google Engineering vice president and developer evangelist @ Mobilebeat Conference, July 2009
It seems a day does not go by when some provider’s app store or download count doesn’t make news. While apps are top of mind today, there are many reasons to acknowledge that a could computing model makes the most sense for reaching the mass market and driving adoption and usage. Besides the fact that Google says so (sarcasm intended), there are considerable factors to weigh:
- handset fragmentation is costly for developers - over 8000+ device types (Yankee Group), with 20+ widget runtime environments (Symbian Foundation) and various flavors of Java, Brew, Android, Apple and other proprietary handset application platforms - that developers must take master in order to offer a mass market service
- one consumer does not equal one device - as we move from PC to mobile to set top box, consumers will increasingly expect their online services to know their preferences and shift “presence” accordingly.
- the network is a logical focal point - True “internet mobility” requires a new distributed architecture utilizing both in-network intelligence and mobile device processing capabilities.
Novarra recognized early that in-network intelligence could lessen the burden (and cost) for developers and extend reach to any type of mobile handset. Our patented distributed architecture that is the basis of the Vision mobile internet and multimedia platform splits processing between the handset and the network has been copied by others and is now becoming the de-facto approach to enable mass-market reach, performance and usability.