Consumer and business demand for mobile content will soon outpace the ability of telco providers to provide, Belle Labs has warned.

A Bell Labs study says overall cellular traffic generated by IoT devices will only account for 2% of total mobile traffic by 2020, the real pick-up coming when video-enabled sensors and cameras begin to predominate.

Throughout its long and illustrious existence, Bell Labs has focused on the big questions—and in its early days under the ownership of AT&T, on the fundamentals. How else could its researchers have come up with the transistor, charged coupled device image sensors, lasers, and the solar battery.

Now, as part of Nokia, it is still asking the big questions, but geared more towards commercial means and ends.

The first report from its newly created Consulting group focuses on nothing less ambitious than the future of mobile networks—how to build them and how operators will be able to profitably meet traffic demands by 2020.

One major conclusion was that, at the current rate of development and based on today's economics, just 81% of worldwide demand will be met by Wi-Fi and cellular (with Wi-Fi taking up two thirds of the demand.)

The big message is that mobile network operators urgently need to accelerate their investments to overcome this huge projected shortfall.

Bell Labs Consulting emphasises that its study uses its own research on people's desire for digital content and services rather than simply extrapolating to predict future mobile traffic trends. It concludes that "with 3G, 4G (LTE) and small cells alone, operators will not be able to profitably address even half of the demand left untouched by Wi-Fi like technologies."

The answer? Telcos need to adopt new and potentially disruptive business models, and really start pushing on the developments of 5G and cloud technologies, including network function virtualisation (NFV) and software defined networks (SDN).

Marcus Weldon, president and CTO of Nokia Bell Labs, is adamant that the industry urgently needs to start a critical conversation about the future of networks and how to build them.

"The next evolution of humankind will involve 'life automation', and the creation of a world in which billions of interconnected things including smart objects, cameras, robots, sensors and processes exchange real-time video and data streams—not only with people, but with cloud-based systems that extract knowledge from this data and perform tasks to make our work and home lives more convenient and our environment more intelligent.

"The new digital era will produce a dramatic shift in demand, challenging mobile operators to achieve the highest performance at the lowest cost per bit while supporting extensive personalisation," proclaimed Weldon.

By: DocMemory
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