Creating Mobile Feral Hogs!

All of these network and network infrastructure improvements, as well as likely tiered pricing options in the future, will help get us to improved mobile network service. The mobile internet marches on, and there will be increasingly more and more usage of it, and technology will solve the problem ultimately. Just don't expect the ride to be so smooth.

I've read a few articles recently about domesticated pigs who get loose, and in the wild very soon turn into wild boars, eating everything in their path. I know they are a big problem in Texas and Arkansas and many other states, and have started to become a problem in southern New Jersey. I actually saw one of these beasts a long time ago in Hawaii when I was hiking. The thing was huge.

Kind of like some of us who are going hog wild on our mobile networks? We were all nice and pink like a domesticated pig and used our mobile phones according to the known statistical analysis, but now there are some people using mobile networks all the time, such as streaming Pandora all day onto their smartphones. And the mobile wild hog is born!

One response I've seen about the mobile network issues has been more and more PR from the operators in the form of articles and data coming out about the small percent of users who "hog" the networks by taking full advantage of their flat monthly data fee. These people, they say, are the mobile feral hogs and these people are causing YOUR mobile network access to be in jeopardy. And in some respects they are right. But in other respects, some people are just utilizing their pay plans to the fullest, right?

So what can be done about this? When I wrote my blog about attending Mobile World Congress a couple of weeks ago, two themes I mentioned were LTE and Femtocells. LTE is all-IP network, and depending on uplink/downlink measurements, is between 8 and 20 times faster than 3G HSPA. So it will help to reign in these feral hogs living on the mobile broadband network. And given the increased simplicity in its network architecture (being more flat), LTE should be lower CAPEX/OPEX for the operators. So it should all be good, right? Well, sure, but LTE is not exactly right around the next corner.