Press Releases

Mobile Network Meltdown

25 January 2010

Data consumption outstripping available cellular capacity

CEO Comments…

“Its interesting that over the past 3 months the number of invitations to speak at events and the general level of media interest in the problems of the mobile industry is intensifying”

The Cloud has seen an unprecedented level of growth across our European networks as the volume of smart phone shipments grow and the acquirers of the phones seek mobile Internet access – as recently communicated via a Reuters article its abundantly clear to anyone who has used WiFi that its faster and far cheaper than an alternative 3G connection.

“The data consumption challenge facing the mobile industry is acute – a smart phone user reputedly consumes 50 times more data than a standard feature phone customer, seeks flat rate tariffs to avoid excessive network charges, with a full expectation of TV or digital radio quality media”!

“In our opinion the economic model is broken and the problem can only compound as more and more cellular as well as non cellular mobile handheld devices seek more and more data – we do not see a per megabyte tariff succeeding nor complex tariffs seeking to cap data capacity – the public have little interest in the composition of the media they watch, how many bytes of data they are consuming – or for that matter how they are connecting – they simply want a easy, fast and fluent service – all of which The Cloud is striving to deliver”

We have around 500,000 active customers on our network in any given month with the number of users and sessions slowly growing as more and more smart phones are sold and more and more WiFi enabled handhelds seek access to the Internet whilst on the move.

Hand held connections have grown from around 20% to 35% over the course of 2009 and we anticipate will represent something approaching 50% of our connections by 2011.