The mobile data explosion and new approaches to network planning and monetization

The rapid introduction of new mobile data services presents many challenges to wireless service providers. Unlike voice services, whose traffic characteristics are well understood, new data services are far more volatile and their demand on network resources is harder to predict. Data volumes are exploding and impacting not only the ability of the network to support such traffic but are also driving down operator's gross margins. Bell Labs has done analysis around some key solutions to deal with this situation. Insights gained through this work will be shared in this paper.