Mobile data traffic is doubling every nine months, according to Cisco Systems. By 2013, mobile traffic will hit 2 exabytes--2 million terabytes--per month.
For some vendors, the growth rate is even higher. AT&T says its network load has been growing by 4.5x per year for the last two years, in large part (I assume) because of iPhone sales. You may have read about AT&T's pledge to spend over $12 billion this year to expand its wireless and broadband networks, including new 3G spectrum with better coverage and trials of 4G service.
At the Linley Group's Tech Processor Conference this week in San Jose, Calif., we learned what effect this growth is having on equipment makers, especially the companies making the microprocessors that go into network gear.
According to that same Cisco study, the problem goes well beyond iPhones. A 3G-equipped laptop "can generate as much traffic as 450 basic-feature phones" and 15 times the traffic of an iPhone or BlackBerry.
Networks have also gotten smarter, so network processors have much more work to do. Instead of just hundreds or thousands of clock cycles of work per packet on the network, new functions like firewalls, intrusion detection, and antivirus scanning to keep smartphones and laptops safe can require 100,000 cycles of processing on each packet.
Factoring in the growth in the network itself, Michael Coward of Continuous Computing, a company that sells equipment, software, and services to the telecom market, said that network operators need to achieve a 1,200x boost in processing performance between the systems deployed in 2008 and those that will be needed in 2013.
... Read moreOn Friday night, I was over at Santana Row in San Jose, just across the street from the Apple Store at the Westfield Valley Fair mall.
Apple's new Mac OS X Leopard
(Credit: Courtesy of Apple)I could have gone over there and bought a copy of Leopard, Apple's new Mac OS X version 10.5, but I didn't, for two reasons. First, I didn't need to-- I'm a member of the Apple Developer Connection (ADC), so I'll get a copy anyway, eventually. Second, I don't intend to install Leopard right away.
This isn't like my decision not to buy an iPhone. I didn't want an iPhone. I still don't. (The hypothetical future iPhone that includes 3G connectivity based on the recently announced Broadcom 3G "Phone on a chip" plus third-party development, more memory, etc. ... well, I'll be all over that one.)
No, I do want Leopard. But I use my MacBook Pro for business, and I can't afford to have it out of service because there's some undiscovered reliability issue or incompatibility with some critical application like Cisco's VPN software (my Vista Tablet PC still can't VPN into the company network because Cisco is months late with the necessary software update).
I figure I'll wait a couple of weeks to see if any problems get reported, and then I'll go for it.
In the meantime, my older PowerBook G4 has been running Leopard since the first beta release, and I'm very impressed. As Apple itself admits, Leopard isn't about big changes; it's just a huge collection of improvements, some bigger than others.
In a sense, I've already spent $848 to get ready for Leopard-- renewing the ADC membership recently was $499, and buying a new iPod classic with enough free space to use as a Time Machine backup drive on the road was another $349-- so I'm quite eager to make good on the investment by doing the upgrade.
Just another couple of weeks, and it'll happen. And then I'll see if I can't find something original to say about it here that hasn't already been said in a thousand other blogs!
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