As Nico Baken often says “Mobile bits are desperately seeking the nearest fixed line”.
In Barcelona (Mobile World Congres) is has become clear that this truth cannot be ignored anymore, as people are fully exploiting the joys of mobile data connectivity through devices like the Iphone, Android phones and the soon to be added WM7 phones.
“Offloading” data traffic to the nearest fixed line with Internet access is the hot subject. As the amount of traffic currently generated by mobile users is just a drop in the bucket of fixed line data it makes a lot of sense.
As one of my friends says :
The “newly” discovered interest in offload just reinforces the point that we’ve all known: with the exception of mobile satellites, “mobile” networks aren’t mobile at all.People and devices are mobile (or at least untethered) but the networks are fixed and the sooner the traffic is dumped into the fixed network, the better for optimizing use of the radio access links.The reason femto-cells (GSM/HSDPA access point inside a building) interests carriers is that the radio traffic never even leaves the building before it goes into a fixed network. Same with in building WiFi, etc.In addition to facing overload of the radio links, they also are having to deal with inadequately provisioned base stations. If you have multiple users each using multi-MB off the same antenna/base station, a DS3 (let alone T-1s) to the tower won’t cut it. In order to make the entire system scale, they’re having to deploy fiber to the base station.
(Thanks Robert Pepper).
