While the U.S. didn’t make the finals in the World Cup, mobile TV providers scored big. Mobile television provider MobiTV reported the tournament was the single biggest viewing event in the company’s history, with average viewership increasing fourfold to about 30 minutes per session. Also, ESPN reported 8.2 million visits to its World Cup mobile Web application and content.

Article Tools

• 

What does the World Cup have to do with wireless networks? For one, these statistics show that consumers are getting a real “kick” out of digital media. In fact, it’s estimated that video is now responsible for up to 50% of mobile traffic. Carriers are experiencing the biggest bandwidth strains since launching mobile data, and much of that strain is coming from video. Sites such as Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube account for a significant portion of mobile traffic—traffic that mobile operator networks were never built to handle.

Combine this with the “iPhone effect”—mobile devices that encourage users to discover and use a wide range of bandwidth-intensive “apps for that”—and the so-called “YouTube for the Enterprise” phenomenon, where online video is quickly moving out of the toy box and into the corporate tool box, and it’s easy to see how this meteoric rise in digital media and mobile viewership is taxing carrier networks to an extent never seen before.

Khurram P. Sheikh is chief product and development officer at Powerwave Technologies as well as chairman of Powerwave’s Technical Advisory Board. He holds advanced graduate degrees in electrical engineering with specialization in wireless communications from Stanford University. Also, he completed an executive development course in product development from the Harvard Business School.

To this end, carriers are eager to roll out 4G networks that will enable a significantly improved user experience over the next few years. 4G will provide greater bandwidth, but it is also much more disruptive as a true IP-based (Internet Protocol) network model. Expect handsets or devices to become increasingly more intelligent with a growing emphasis on location-based services. Additionally, and this is key, the network will wrap around and follow the user as opposed to the user having to “access” into the network.

Continue to next page