Wireless Connectivity

Wireless Networks Feel the Squeeze

When Apple Inc.'s first iPhone hit the airwaves last summer in the United States, there was no precedent for how consumers would use such a device. AT&T Inc., the phone company with the exclusive rights to the smart phone, saw traffic on its wireless network balloon.

Over the next year, AT&T spent billions upgrading its equipment so it could handle a wave of more powerful smart phones, including the next iPhone model. These devices, termed 3G phones (for third generation), handle rich media such as live music and television and they tax wireless networks as never before.

Other mobile phone companies in North America have been rushing ahead with their own network upgrades. Among them is Rogers Wireless Inc., which today launches Research In Motion Ltd.'s counterpunch to the iPhone, the BlackBerry Bold.

With new products like the iPhone and the BlackBerry Bold, smart phone customers want to duplicate the Internet experience they are used to on their desktop computers, says Daniel Locklear, vice-president of strategy for Nortel Networks Corp.'s carrier networks division.

That creates great opportunity for a phone company, but also adds tremendous pressure to its network, he says. “They're having to continually balance the capacity of the network. There certainly has been a great enhancement from 2G to 3G, but still pressures are put on the network.”

Telecoms are beginning to experience clogged networks, says Lucas Skoczkowski, chief executive officer of Redknee Solutions Inc., which sells software to the wireless industry.

He attributes the congestion to three things. Smart phones and plug-in modems for laptops that give consumers on-the-go access to the Internet. The advent of large “bucket” plans that offer customers “unlimited” data over their devices. And the availability of new services on the Web such as YouTube and Sling Media that consume great chunks of bandwidth and are outside the control of phone companies.


A single customer tapping a multimedia feature on a smart phone, by conservative estimates, might consume 500 kbps of data. The maximum download speed on a North American 3G network today is 10Mbps. That means there need be only 20 people connecting through the same cell site using a basic multimedia feature task on their phone before there's some amount of service degradation.

“It's only a matter of time before there is a critical mass,” Mr. Skoczkowski says.

Adding network capacity is an expensive proposition. A phone company building 1,200 cell sites to cover most major Canadian cities spends roughly between $100-million and $120-million on network equipment, which amounts to about $100,000 per cell site, according to one industry estimate. That price doesn't include other costs, such as building the towers, leasing real estate, maintenance and energy consumption.

Canadian cellphone operators say their networks are in good shape. While AT&T launched the iPhone with an unlimited data plan and saw network traffic soar, Rogers chose to put limits on how much data an iPhone customer could use.

BCE Inc.'s Bell Mobility, meanwhile, recently launched the Samsung Instinct phone with an unlimited Internet access deal that gives customers all the browsing they want.

“The data network is fully capable of handling this level of access – we've built the network to handle the busiest likely data traffic peaks for Internet access,” spokesman Mark Langton said.

But there are already anecdotal signs of congestion in Canada's wireless industry. On blogs and tech forums, some users talk about download speeds declining. On wirelessnorth.ca, one user writes how service seems to degrade in Waterloo, Ont., home of RIM's headquarters. The high density of RIM employees and BlackBerry users has made access “painful” at times, but now service is often “choked” until the user heads down the highway to the next city, the post says.

By SIMON AVERY

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