Is The Mobile Network Keeping Up?

Smart phones are everywhere now.  Every major carrier has its fleet of smart phones, and they are becoming more and more commonplace in the American market.  Great news for mobile marketing, right?  Maybe, maybe not…

Unfortunately, while carriers are burning the midnight oil to get the next great phone out to consumers, they aren’t spending nearly as much time or effort ensuring that the network can keep up with increased bandwidth demands.  As David Nowicki, Vice President of Marketing and Product Management for mobile broadband solutions company Airvana states,

Conventional wisdom has been that data traffic produced by laptops equipped with mobile broadband was the culprit when looking at the impact on the network.  The industry is just now beginning to understand the real impact of smart phones on network performance and we’re finding that their effect is distinctly out of proportion to the amount of data they transmit and receive.

Justin from Mobile Marketing Watch points out that a smart phone uses up to eight times the amount of bandwidth as a laptop using a mobile DSM modem.  Eight times?  Really?  It seems like smart phones have sacrificed efficiency for performance.  While I am as excited as the next guy for phones like Motorola’s Droid, maybe we need to start making smarter smart phones.