The huge growth in mobile broadband connections will need crucial new spectrum to provide capacity to meet the burgeoning demand, Ovum analyst Nathan Burley told AMTA’s Networking Forum in Melbourne last night.

He said mobile broadband connections for netbooks, laptops, PC and other devices grew around 81% in the year to December 2009. “Operators must continue investing in more capacity to support growth,” he said.

“Investment is needed to support growth and guard against service degradation, and managing capacity will be an increasingly important differentiator.,” he said.

Mr Burley said networks could offload traffic off main networks to manage peak traffic demand. Networks could also employ cell splitting to increase network density and quality of service and lower prioritization to segment tariffs and ensure performance, especially in times of congestion.

However, at some point such measures would be become inefficient and the networks would have to acquire more access to spectrum to meet consumer demand.

Mr Burley said: “In October 2009, Optus stated that traffic is growing 18% month-on-month, while Telstra (which has a bigger installed base) has stated that mobile data traffic is doubling every eight months. Investment is needed to support growth and guard against service degradation, and managing capacity will be an increasingly important differentiator. Significantly more capacity will also be opened up by new spectrum from the digital dividend and 2.5GHz bands, which should become available for LTE in the medium term.

“New spectrum will be crucial in providing capacity to meet traffic growth requirements.”

Mr Burley said 3G connections were driving data growth with expanding 3G footprints, network speeds and capacity along with price cutting driving further competition and uptake.