Connected Cars Could Add 97% More Data Traffic at Some Cells in 10 Years

If nothing else is done (and obviously, something will be done), connected cars at rush hour could double data traffic double in certain cells, researchers at Machina Research say.

The study, commissioned by analytics company TEOCO, predicts a 97 percent increase in data traffic over the next decade, caused primarily by connected cars.

Some of you would not be surprised by a prediction of 100 percent increase in traffic, on any network, at any site, over a decade.

What the study intends to highlight is the specific new demand created solely by the connected cars.

By 2024, Machina Research predicts “machine-to-machine” mobile network connections increase from 250 million in 2014 to more than 2.3 billion worldwide.

Obviously, all those new devices, an order of magnitude more, would produce, all other things being equal, an order of magnitude additional demand. But the usage profile might be notable for its difference from human-used smartphones, tablets and PCs.

M2M applications and services will account for just four percent of overall network traffic in 2024, Machina Research predicts.

So bandwidth consumption is not the problem so much as network resource management, which always is more complicated than comparable fixed network planning, since the nodes are stationary.

The study suggests a number of ways the management  problems can be addressed, including the integration of capacity supplied by unlicensed networks and offload.