Speaking to a number of Mobile operators recently about the effect mobile data has had on their network. Not ‘news’ of course, but interesting to hear their side of it.

We’ve seen mobile carriers increasingly specifying IP and Carrier Ethernet for their backbone upgrades, but people usually cite Cost as the reason, and overlook Flexibility. These guys have had their fingers burnt by building backbones in the early part of this decade from ‘legacy’ E1 or similar TDM lego bricks, and ended up with a network which is hard to scale in capacity terms. 

This sounded OK in the early days of smartPhones because things changed slowly. Blackberries just shunted emails back and forth, and when the iPhone was launched, many assumed it would have a  similar effect. Very wrong. The basic iPhone, of course, produced a false sense of security because it was just that – a phone. It took Apple’s launch of the 3G version, in late 2008, to turn on the firehose. iPhone sales shot from 700,000 in Q3, to seven million in Q4, and users never looked back. One of our guiding principles at NetEvidence is that providing a good user interface is key – more important, in fact than sheer depth of data. The iPhone illustrates this nicely : simply dump the web on a phone, as people had done previously, and little happens. But make the web usable on a phone, and the world tilts on its axis. Stuck with old-style TDM backbones, operators saw their traffic growing exponentially in a matter of months, but lacked the flexibility to do much about it. We’ve all seen the result. Carrier Ethernet – plus the right core hardware from vendors such as Juniper who 'get' this space -  allows them to turn bandwidth up and down easily. Assuming of course they have a good performance reporting solution in place so they know when to change things. Which reminds me…