Heavy signalling traffic may be a bane to telcos

[SINGAPORE] As fourth generation mobile communication technology (4G) gains momentum across Asia, telcos will struggle with not just heavy traffic demand from smartphones and tablets, but also signalling storms that can crash their networks, warns Robert Pizzari, F5 Networks' director of Service Provider Sales for Asia-Pacific and Japan.

The heavy traffic comes with mobile devices making multiple connections to the network, such as when accessing applications, downloading data, roaming and even when switching between an idle and an active mode; these connections, especially social networking updates that constantly poll the network, generate a lot of signalling traffic.

And, as revenue generating services increase, the need to track the data usage of simultaneous applications, manage policies and enable real-time transaction and authorisation bumps up the signalling volume. An overload can then lead to poor performance or a network crash.