Mobile broadband becoming a victim of its own success
Monday, 12 October 2009 10:46.
I read with great interest an article from the BBC about the mobile broadband operators feeling the strain as more and more users become equipped with devices such as 3G dongles and smart phones to access the Internet. The core issue is whilst the number of network users is rapidly increasing, the available bandwidth is not with some network operators already claiming that the ‘current levels of use are crippling their network.’
There are a number of reasons for the increase in network usage; fundamentally, a significant portion of the population across Europe now own 3G USB dongles allowing their laptop to access broadband rather than paying for the traditional home broadband service. Coupled with the increasingly media-rich content of the internet, voice over IP (VoIP) and a greater emphasis on remote working, the existing networks are struggling to keep up with the demand.
Proposals to resolve the issues include opening up more of the wireless spectrum for use, adding surcharges to high volume users and throttling or even blocking the heaviest of individual users.
Application Performance Monitoring (APA), Packet Shaping and WAN acceleration are techniques which can be used to benefit not only the service providers but also mobile workers. Using APA , bandwidth utilization can be broken down into a more granular view of the network showing individual applications (e.g. HTTP, CIFS, VoIP, Streaming Video, Remote Desktop.) Individual hosts can be identified for both excessive usage and also as sources of network attacks via worms, viruses, and denial of service attempts. Packet shaping can then be employed to control these hosts from degrading the perceived user experience and also safeguarding more critical real time applications such as voice or remote desktop from being affected by heavy less critical traffic such as CIFS / HTTP.
WAN Acceleration techniques can reduce the amount of traffic having to traverse the network through mobile clients being installed on the remote workers laptops. Data deduplication and protocol optimisation are some of the techniques which can reduce both the amount of data to be transmitted across the WAN and latency experienced by the applications. This will significantly improve network performance through a simple software installation which is then managed remotely at the data centre.
The above techniques are just some of the ways that overloaded networks can be improved upon whilst delaying costly capacity upgrades which are often unable to reduce the underlying problem due to hosts attempting to consume as much bandwidth as is available.
BBC News Online. 2009. Mobile broadband feels the strain [Accessed 5 October 2009]. Available from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8281314.stm
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