The Implications of Mobile Data Surpassing Voice
A very interesting milestone was recently reached. As Ericsson reports, mobile data surpassed voice on a global basis in December 2009, Ericsson. This finding is based on Ericsson’s measurements on live networks covering all regions of the world.
So what implications will this have on 3G and 4G? The most obvious is the demand for more bandwidth in the radio access network. It will have to be optimized for carrying data traffic. Voice services must be preserved, but data will dominate. And keep in mind that we are just in the early stages of the mobile data explosion.
Carriers have been trying to patch their networks in different ways to support more aggressive mobile data traffic volumes for some years now. Ethernet and circuit emulation in different variants have been introduced. Ethernet is a more high performance transport technology compared to ATM (AAL2 for voice and AAL5 for data). But carriers need rigorous synchronization schemes over Ethernet to make it work. And there are other challenges like where to terminate legacy services and where to introduce the Ethernet ports? How can the new transport network comply to existing service provisioning schemes?
If the trends observed by Ericsson are correct, we are heading toward a data optimized radio access infrastructure faster than anyone expected. The Ethernet-based transport in the radio access network is needed to cope with the mobile data explosion. There are different attempts to solve this. We can learn from China Mobile’s PTN requirements which utilizes an Ethernet-based transport with synchronization support based on point-to-point (PTP) Ethernet. These networks are designed for data growth, but continue to support voice. And these requirements are here and now. They are designed for 2G, 3G and beyond.
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