The novel distributed mobility management trend is a promising direction to cope with the increasing mobile data traffic and flatten network architectures.
So the bumper returns Vodafone once expected from mobile data traffic may be threatened.
smartphones consumed 92% of global mobile data traffic, despite only making up 18% of the handsets in use globally.
But what some do find surprising is that more than half of all mobile data traffic comes from video.
Globally, mobile data traffic is expected to double every year through 2013, according to Cisco Systems, which makes network gear.
Cisco Systems, the networking company, recently published a study that predicts mobile data traffic could grow eighteenfold by 2016.
It expects mobile data traffic to grow by as much as 750% in the next three years.
Rogers Communications, a Canadian operator, estimates that 90 percent of mobile data traffic still runs on GPRS networks.
In Nigeria alone 16 smartphones are sold every minute, while mobile data traffic across Africa is set to increase 15-fold by 2020.
Along with laptops and tablets, smartphones will drive 90 percent of mobile data traffic five years from now, according to Cisco.
With its faster speed and greater capacity to handle the explosive growth in mobile data traffic, operators are wagering that LTE will be critical to future profitability.
