Today’s mobile communication networks may be considered to be at a crossroad.

Current subscriber demand for high quality undisrupted mobile communication service implies continual maintenance and upgrades of the existing circuit switched voice networks. Increasing demand for multimedia communication services requires high quality bandwidth and capacity availability in a resilient and cost effective manner.

Mobile Market Transformation

According to the UMTS forum white paper Recognizing the Future of Mobile Broadband , “Mobile broadband subscribers and revenues in the top five European markets are forecast to nearly double by 2011. Subscriber numbers are predicted to rise from about 22 million at the end of 2009 to over 43 million in 2011 and revenues to rise from less than 6 billion in 2009 to more than 11 billion in 2011”

In any multimedia session, a laptop generates the equivalent signaling load as 1300 basic feature phones, a smartphone generates 10 times more traffic than a basic phone and an iphone generates up to 30 times more signaling traffic and equivalent load than a basic phone with speech capabilities.