By Carrisa Baptiste- Mobile Devices Consultant, Advocate Networks, LLC
It has been years since I’ve used a paper telephone book, I use yellowpages.com. Several of my friends have received their diplomas from online educational institutions. Let’s not forget my eleven year old nephew who has a cellular phone and uses the internet to connect with other players using his Sony Play station.
Wow, how amazing the internet is and the fascinating opportunities it provides to our world!
Over the next few years, blackberries and other personal data devices will be the primary source for wireless connectivity verses the traditional cellular devices. In doing so, the demand for instant and constant connectivity to the internet will increase. It is essential that we start enlarging our infrastructure to allow for additional usage on the network.
My teenage cousin is a freshman in college and utilizes the social web sites such as myspace.com and facebook.com to stay in touch with her friends around the world. These sites allow us to put information about ourselves on there, which often times include videos, songs and pictures.
So what’s the point of all this? As most of us know, all this new business activity and Gen-Y social dependency on the web places increasingly arduous demands on our network. As this trend continues, the demands on the internet increases and we need to ensure that it is scaleable.
In a recent Web 2.0 forum, Jim Cicconi, VP of Legislative Affairs for AT&T predicted that the Internet could reach its physical capacity to carry all this traffic by as early as 2010. Furthermore, he predicts a 50-fold increase in broadband traffic by 2015.
In my work with our Customers, it’s clear that the trend in enterprise wireless devices is toward more and more bandwidth consumption. This is driven not only by proliferation of affordable wireless broadband services, but also by the increasingly common web-accessibility of enterprise applications. Let’s also not forget the 500 pound gorilla in this mix- video (and her 1,000 pound daddy- HD video).
I wasn’t one of the first to engage in on-line banking, on-line shopping, surfing and online-communicating. However, I cannot imagine life without them. Organizations invest large sums of money in order to provide products and services to their customers in a timely and efficient manner. The internet is a key piece of this element, not only allowing ease of use but often times a competitive advantage. Internet delivery of services to Customers is the great enabler of B2C sales in this decade.
All this is perhaps a long-winded way of agreeing with Mr. Cicconi that the risk of Internet capacity is a problem that is critical from a variety of perspectives. Mitigation of that risk largely comes from investment by the carriers profiting from the use of the web. While there’s a demonstrated temptation to legislate the path to this risk mitigation, let’s hope that this takes a course that enables unrestricted and open use by businesses and consumers while pragmatically profitable to the service providers.
Thanks go to Carrisa Baptiste of Advocate Networks, LLC for contributing this post.
