Bell Labs forecasts mobile capacity crunch

A Bell Labs study says overall cellular traffic generated by IoT devices will only account for 2 percent 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.

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.

The three key questions addressed by the group were:

1. What is the potential demand for new services today and by how much will it grow by 2020—globally and regionally?
2. How much of that demand can be met by unlicensed spectrum solutions and how can mobile operators profitably deliver the remaining (high mobility, long range, high performance) services?
3. How does the network have to change? How can new technologies and architectures help address the critical challenges?
4. 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.)

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