The past six years have been a wild ride for the mobile technology industry, but some analysts believe that it will run out of gas before too long, and that we may already be seeing the signs.
The main warning comes from a principle in wireless data transfer named for the father of mobile telephony and called Cooper's Law.
The gist of the law is similar to Moore's Law in computing processor power: basically that the number of conversations that can be broadcast over all usable radio in a given location doubles every two-and-a-half years, which has allowed for our explosive mobile phone growth.
Unfortunately, the dawn of the smartphone age through data transfer broadcasts into the same spectrum as the voice conversations.
And data usage has been doubling every year.
Tag on the estimate that there will be more mobile phones than humans on earth in 2017, and, as some are pointing out, we may have a communication problem.
Now one of the biggest sources of our data explosion is the massive and growing popularity of video-streaming services — Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter's new Vine service and others. In fact, traffic analysis estimates streaming video as making up half of all data transferred.
Our heavily burdened airwaves will be receiving some relief on this front very soon, as devices and services switch over to the H.265 video codec, which compresses videos to almost half the size of the current standard, even while improving quality.
And the new broadcast standards that seem to pop up every other smartphone generation have also become very good at increasing efficiency. The jumps from simple 1G voice to the 2G EDGE networks that the first iPhone worked on, and the following jump to 3G, were both 1,000 times more efficient than their predecessors. And engineers are already thinking two or three G's down the line.
The governments, who control who gets to use which portions of the broadcast spectrum, have also been working on ways to reorganize and shift things around for more room. The biggest change came a few years ago, when analog TV broadcasts were ended and that space was reused. Now talks about reallocating military and satellite communications are squeezing for more room as well.
These efforts should be able to hold us over until the International Telecommunications Union conference in 2015, when industry and government leaders from around the world will be figuring out longer term solutions.
So it probably won't be as bad as the doom-preppers and naysayers may claim, but then again, it never really is.
