Lately, service providers have been facing an influx of subscribers who’ve been unable to complete phone calls or send text messages, or have experienced extremely slow data speeds, all the while having to deal with relatively small data caps! This poor mobile experience is partly due to the network congestion issues in the service provider’s mobile data networks. I think it’s safe to say we’ve all experienced this one way or another by now. And if you think it’s getting worse, it is!

Sometimes it’s hard to visualize data (especially if you’re on a bad network!). Here at Dialogic, we thought it would be interesting and cool to create an Infographic that illustrates just how serious the mobile congestion problem is:

To download the graphic, please go here:

So just how serious is this problem?

Well, smartphones represent 82% of the global handset traffic even though they represent only 12% of total global handsets in use today. By 2014, smartphones will be 50% of all handsets shipped!

So just imagine what this all means for the next two years. You guessed it: mind-boggling unprecedented mobile data traffic growth! In fact, smartphone traffic in 2016 will be 50x greater than it was in 2011. Tablets alone will generate almost as much traffic in 2016 as the entire global mobile network in 2012!

Mobile subscribers deserve to be happy

Subscribers aren’t the only ones being negatively affected by the bandwidth crunch. Service providers are facing a growing gap between the revenue they earn per user and the bandwidth a user consumes.

What does this mean? That we’ll just all have to live with congestion? Be frustrated all the time?

No it doesn’t. The mobile industry understands this and there are a number of solutions that have been proposed, ranging from Wi-Fi offloading to data capping to building more advanced networks. However, optimization products remain key to resolving the mobile congestion crisis!

Adding relatively inexpensive optimization infrastructure products in backhaul, edge or core networks can free up bandwidth by 30%, which increases capacity by 43%!  

So this means Network optimization is an extremely efficient and cost effective mechanism to support growing bandwidth needs while also positioning service providers to get the most value from their current infrastructure and increase their revenue streams.