Operators will be able to handle traffic growth claims analyst

The onslaught of data facing operators in the next few years will not be as overwhelming as the industry is being led to believe, an Informa analyst has claimed. Speaking at the Broadband Traffic Management congress in London, Kris Szaniawski, Principal Analyst, at Informa Telecoms & Media said that traffic growth over the news five years would see increases in the 8-10 fold range, rather than the 100s that have been predicted.

“It’s not the tsunami that we were talking about six months ago. It’s more about controllable growth rather than uncontrollable growth.”

He also intimated that some parts of the industry were inflating those figures for their own purposes. “It tends to be the vendors that put the figures at the top of the scale,” he said.

Szaniawski admited that as low cost smartphones begin to enter the market there would be a need for operators to carry out more aggressive network upgrades to maintain and increase profitability. The good news however was that as smatphones become mass-market commodities the average user consumption would go down, helping to even out the peaks and troughs.

Striking another positive note he said that the benefits of optimisation, wifi offload, use of policy, and the need for tiered pricing were being increasingly understood by operators, and pointed to the increased Vodafone profits as an example of effective execution.

Szaniawski emphasised his point with an image of a man surfing a very large wave explaining that, “it was in the news that last week that some guy broke the record by surfing a 90ft wave. You may worry about being able to handle the data that’s coming, but a 90ft wave is clearly something that’s handleable. So if there’s a message, it’s that what is out there is handleable.”