A recent article in the Economist, titled "Breaking up saturated mobile networks", underlined the problems mobile network operators (MNO) face as demand for data access surges.

The article is empathetic with a recent Quocirca report "Keeping mobile data flowing: Mobile data application delivery control". The Economist spells out the growth in data traffic in just one year, and goes on to suggest that technology is not adapting to this increasing demand as fast as it did during the explosive growth of the fixed line internet:

"At the end of 2008 there were 189m mobile-broadband connections, generating on average 175 megabytes of traffic per month, according to Bernstein Research. A year later the respective figures were 312m and 273 megabytes. Data traffic thus grew by a whopping 158%"

"But wireless technology is not improving as fast as the kit behind fixed-line internet services did in the 1990s."

Quocirca's report elaborates on this by describing technology that can help with making data transfer across mobile networks more efficient— application delivery controllers (ADC). ADCs were developed for the IT world to ensure that IT applications could handle surges in demand effectively and deliver data back to end users consuming minimum bandwidth using techniques like compression, caching and so on. Both issues are prescient for mobile operators delivering data across networks that are even more bandwidth constrained than IT ones. Deploying ADCs could help to ensure that a given mobile data application delivers its load back to mobile user devices (which include smartphones and laptops/e-readers with mobile access dongles) more efficiently.

Quocirca"s report concludes: "The hunger, from both business and consumer users, to access data from their mobile devices is only going to increase for the foreseeable future. For MNOs, it will be hard to predict what the new mobile data applications will be and how widely their subscribers will use them. The one thing MNOs can do when providing access to new mobile data applications is to ensure the application itself, and the traffic it generates, is handled as efficiently as possible. In doing so, MNOs can be more responsive to the wide-ranging demands of their subscribers and ensure that they can, at least, meet expected service levels, if not exceed them".

The report is freely available here and will be published on the Quocirca web site at a later date.