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Paolini: Managing data traffic in real time, down at the cell level

20.05.12

In a recent report , I argued that data caps are not effective as a traffic management tool as they may encourage peak traffic, and thus increase congestion, instead of containing it. Fairly enough, one question that I often get is what works then, if data caps don't. Mobile operators have different tools--Wi-Fi and small-cell offload, policy, content optimization, QoS-based tiering to name a few--and they will have to employ many of them to manage traffic effectively.

One can argue that since the time-of-day usage patterns are known (Figure 1) and are relatively constant across markets and time, most of the benefits of traffic management can be extracted by simply activating tools during the evening peak hours. Yet, if we go beyond the average and look at different location types (Figure 2) we see that the traffic distribution through the day varies greatly. As a result traffic management tools that work across the entire network are bound to have only limited efficacy. They either have to be too broadly used to capture peak usage all different location types, or too narrowly used and unable to effectively manage traffic at peak time in a subset of locations.

Source: FierceWireless