Paving the path to all-IP mobile

Mobile data traffic growth has put the spotlight on the need for cellcos to adopt efficient and flexible all-IP architectures. But cellcos and IP experts at a online discussion in January say that IP networks should evolve only if the economics are justified. The event, moderated by Telecom Asia global technology editor John C Tanner and sponsored by Cisco, was held via telepresence at sites in Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney and Mumbai.

John Tanner: What types of devices are customers using and what impact is that having on your IP resources and your network?

Christian Daigneault: Dongles are generating about 80% of all our traffic at this point. The other 20% is mostly smartphones, and traffic for both has grown by about the same factor - 18 to 20 times - since we launched HSPA+ nine months ago. And this is not stopping. When we talk about the iPhone, and those type of phones, we see new devices like this coming out on a monthly basis, so this is not going to stop.

Stephen Chau: In our network, more than 80% of our traffic is generates by the dongles. Also, we are offering a residential fixed-broadband-type service [using HSPA as the last-mile link]. So from that perspective, if you include that with the dongles, that actually represents more than 90% of the total data traffic volumes.

Anthony Goonan: I can relate completely to that 90% figure. And within that, about half of our data is just straight http-type traffic. Around 10% of it is YouTube and other streaming-type services. High-end smartphones, for Telstra at least, are contributing seven to ten times as much data as a standard-feature phone. And our data traffic in Telstra is roughly doubling every eight months.

Lam Hong Kit: One thing to add on the point of http traffic, from what we see, that's not only just for http web, but also progressive downloads. I don't know the exact split, but a big portion of http comes from the video via the progressive download, and YouTube is one part of that.

Tim Mark: Our colleagues in the US, and even some of them outside the US, are seeing traffic doubling every six months because of video and telepresence - all the traffic has been doubling. We're really seeing that from the infrastructure side.

Jayesh Easwaramony: Basically what is happening is you're creating a much bigger addressable market for service providers. So if you look at mobile broadband, instead of having one household broadband connection, you are actually selling four connections - each laptop will have a connection. Also, we talk about smartphones and netbooks, but there's also going to be another entire set of devices - which could be tablet PCs or e-book readers - which are going to further the gap between netbooks and smartphones.