Mobile broadband uptake has taken to such heights that in less than five years, an estimated 50 billion connected devices will be accessing mobile services worldwide. With overload occurring both on the control and data planes, planning and investing in 3G and Long Term Evolution networks will continue to be problematic.

 

Although LTE is being introduced rapidly in markets from Africa to Uzbekistan, demand will always outstrip network capacity. AT&T estimates that demand will grow by 5,000% in the next five years, yet upgrading to LTE will only offer a tenfold improvement in capacity.

 

Innovative data management solutions must be applied, and will need to include a variety of offload options. Offload is about helping operators deal with explosive traffic growth without expanding network capacity in a linear fashion to keep pace.

 

Wi-Fi offload has moved rapidly to the forefront of traffic management discussions, relieving pressure on the most costly component of the mobile network, the radio access network (RAN). The approach uses free spectrum, delivered on proven technology, and that is available and ubiquitous on mobile devices.

 

However, there are several ways to incorporate Wi-Fi access into a mobile operator’s service mix and the choice of solution has long-term implications.

 

The UMA/GAN (unlicensed mobile access/generic access network) and wireless LAN interworking products and standards provide a vetted blueprint for embracing unlicensed Wi-Fi spectrum into an operators service mix. However the technology never achieved mainstream acceptance and some of the few operators that have deployed are now moving away from the technology.

 

An alternative to the 3GPP standard Wi-Fi solution allows the mobile equipment to connect to any Wi-Fi network and access content over the fixed line operator network – the simplest solution with most mobile data users consuming content from the internet. The approach calls into question who is looking out for the customer; who knows how much data the user consumes on Wi-Fi, and who can they call when a problem arises?