“When it comes to the Internet of Things and wearables, currently the footprint of that kind of traffic is actually pretty small. That may change, and I do think that at some point in the future, we’ll hit a point where the nodes are going to just outnumber phones and tablets by a huge amount and we might see serious changes to things then but we’re a long way from that now.”
This is an attitude mirrored by Tierney, of Vodafone Ireland, who believes that as far as increased capacity in the near future is concerned, Vodafone is well prepared.
For example not all traffic needs the same prioritisation — if you’re sending an e-mail you don’t care if it takes an additional 30 seconds to arrive, but if you’re making a video call, you do care if the speed drops. You don’t know what other people sharing your connection are using it for, but their usage can affect the service you get, Brian McBride, Data Edge
Capacity challenge
“We’re not concerned about the Internet of Things because we’ve made the investments to allow our networks to cope with enormous loads already. Internationally, we’ve been at the forefront of this and already there are lots of IoT applications running on our networks,” he said.
“Everything from the data connectivity contained within Kindle devices to download e-books, to remote cattle feed monitors to more all run on the Vodafone network already. We’ve been talking about it for about ten years and now this is here and soon there will be many more devices connected to each other than the average consumer will ever be aware of.”
For other operators, it will remain a challenge to keep their networks maintained, up to speed and running at full capacity. According to Brian McBride, managing director of Data Edge, the biggest challenge for these companies is not connecting devices to the network, but rather with the backhaul network.
“When you have a lot of people in a particular geographical area using smart phones and other mobile devices to send files and watch videos and so on, all that data has to be sent to and from a particular tower,” he said.
“That tower has to carry all that traffic back to a consolidation site where other towers contribute their data loads and you can end up a very large backhaul of traffic. To cope with this, the backhaul network has to be beefed up to carry all this traffic but a major issue is that most of the carriers don’t actually know what the make-up of that traffic is.”
Currently it is not clear from this body of traffic what percentage is work or recreational in nature or what percentage should be prioritised or not.
Work and play
“For example not all traffic needs the same prioritisation — if you’re sending an e-mail you don’t care if it takes an additional 30 seconds to arrive, but if you’re making a video call, you do care if the speed drops. You don’t know what other people sharing your connection are using it for, but their usage can affect the service you get,” he said.
“Take Voice over LTE — it’s like voice over IP but it’s newer and it uses the network and it means that your voice calls can end up sharing the network with every other kind of traffic, from Netflix traffic to Twitter and so on. Unless that’s managed very carefully, voice quality can suffer.”
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