Management World Americas 2012: Assuring Targeted CAPEX Investments
By Marc Lippe, Director, Worldwide Field and Corporate Marketing, InfoVista
Here we are on the last day of Management World Americas 2012 (I am always amazed by how quickly the days pass at large conferences!). Looking back at the takeaways from this week, it is clear that the digital world is growing more rapidly than we ever could have imagined.
According to keynote speaker Dr. Bob Roche, VP of research at CTIA, mobile users have sent one trillion megabytes of data in the past 12 months from more than 21 million tablets and laptops. As a result, wireless data volumes have more than doubled in the past year. But at the same time as this explosion of network traffic, there is a simultaneous explosion of opportunities for those that enable these data volumes.
As U.S. mobile operators struggle to stay ahead of this growth, Dr. Roche reported, they have invested $25 billion in network upgrades in the past 12 months alone, including 29,000 new cell sites throughout North America. They have also invested $350 billion into cumulative capital expenditures (CAPEX), including building out network elements and adding more fiber to expand their 4G networks.
I found this metric particularly interesting, wondering whether those billions of dollars are helping to address growing bandwidth demands – or if mobile operators are throwing money at the problem rather aimlessly. More and more, communications service providers (CSPs) must focus on the intricacies of network, application and service performance, such as how traffic is traversing a given network or network component, the type of data traveling in a network, the source of that traffic and how it interacted with other traffic, all at a very finite level. With that information, CSPs can get a clear picture of what infrastructure is and isn’t working – but without it, this money could all be for not.
Time will tell how these investments impact future mobile traffic levels, and perhaps we will have answers at Management World Americas 2013. In the meantime, it will be interesting to watch the world of digital services continue to unfold.
