There's going to be gridlock in the airwaves in the future, with too many people trying to watch too many videos on too many smart phones over too little spectrum, according to a new report commissioned by the wireless industry.
That means the government needs to find and free up even more bandwidth quickly, independent research consultants Ryasavy Research concluded, noting that it took a decade or so for the government to put together the recent 700 Mhz auction.
Otherwise, mobile users will find themselves stuck in a future where the only time they can get decent service is when no one else is around.
"Current market and technology trends will very likely result in the exhaustion of currently available spectrum," the "Mobile Broadband Spectrum Demand" report (.pdf) found. "Within the next decade, licensing significant amounts of additional spectrum will be imperative if the United States wants its mobile operators to continue expanding and upgrading the country’s wireless broadband networks."
The report was commissioned by the CTIA, the wireless industry's trade and lobbying group. The group is pushing the recently introduced Radio Spectrum Inventory Act from Sens. John Kerry (D-Massachusetts) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine)
that would require the government to quickly and thoroughly map out what radio spectrum has been allotted to whom, in order to make it easier for the FCC to re-allocate spectrum into blocks that could be auctioned off.
Watching a typical web video on a phone takes more than 100 times the bandwidth than a phone call, and the surging popularity of smart phones portends lucrative and explosive hunger for mobile broadband in the coming years. AT&T, which has been struggling to find enough bandwidth to feed iPhone users, predicts that data traffic will increase 250 to 600 times by 2018, while voice minutes will only triple in the same time frame.
New wireless technologies — such as WiMax and LTE — use the airwaves more efficiently than current data networks but still will not be able to handle the expected demand, the report found.
Visions of a crowded future might be found in iPhone users' experiences at the 2009 SXSW tech conference, where the convergence of too many geeks with the same phone overloaded the towers and strangled everything including text messaging.
That's what to expect in the future without more spectrum being freed up, the report found.
"Several users within the same cell sector engaging simultaneously in high?throughput applications (e.g., video streaming) can quickly strain the network, impacting the user experience for every consumer accessing the network, even if they are not themselves engaging in bandwidth?intensive activities," the report found.
In actual tests, the company found that simply having four 3G network users in the same place chopped throughput by 60%.
The problem, however, is that many new technologies need wide swaths of continuous spectrum — 20 to 40 Mhz worth — which may be very hard for the government to find.
Image: Courtesy Rysavy Report
See Also:
- FCC to 700MHz Spectrum Bidders: You Better Have Bank
- In Spectrum Auction, Winners Are AT&T, Verizon and Openness ...
- FCC Free Wireless Spectrum Equals Censorship Technology Bonanza ...
- FCC's Spectrum Auction Approaches $20B in Bids
- Death, Taxes and Bandwidth Caps
- Feds Want Your Help With Broadband Policy
