The Economic Impact of Mobile IP

The economic impact of Mobile IP, the standard that allows IP sessions to be maintained even when switching between different cells or networks, has been nothing short of staggering in terms of both scale and acceleration. As noted, the first smartphones appeared around 2007. Their success quickly led to a proliferation of smart devices. Industry analysts predict that by the end of 2015, there will be more than 2 billion smart devices in service, with a market value of more than $700 billion. These devices will drive an applications market expected to be worth another $25 billion in the same period.

As remarkable as this growth is, it's dwarfed by the growth in data usage. According to studies, data usage grew by an average of 400 percent per year between 2005 and 2010 in the U.S. and 350 percent per year in Western Europe. It's instructive to illustrate examples with numbers. Figure 3-8 shows the total mobile data usage on a per-month basis. "Petabytes" is a hard number to understand, however. For an individual, it means that if the average monthly mobile data usage was 20 MB in 2005 (which was a lot back then, and would have been quite expensive), the same average user would consume 20 GB per month in 2010—a mind-bending 100,000 percent increase.

The other sea change is that by the end of 2014, tablets would exceed PCs in total units sold. This signifies not just a mobile capability, but an expectation of mobility by consumers. This "new normal" affects the entire technology ecosystem. The obvious players affected are the tablet providers and their parts suppliers, who continue to push the limits of performance and miniaturization. This is only the tip of a very large iceberg, however. Under the water line are massive cascading implications for mobile carriers, data suppliers, and their providers.

For the carriers, the amount of data consumed over mobile connections far exceeds even the boldest predictions made 10 or even 5 years ago. What's more, the rate of data consumption seems to be accelerating. Mobile providers have been scrambling to keep up with demand, which has boosted subscription rates and driven a great deal of innovation in the areas of compression, streaming, caching, and other data-delivery efficiencies. Interestingly, though, mobile access is beginning to show signs of commoditization, with some providers now giving away data that used to generate lucrative data plans. For example, one major carrier now offers unlimited music streaming outside the data plan. This is a great way to capture a group of users (mostly teens and young adults) who represent potential lifelong customers.

Data providers have also seen incredible growth, and are rapidly becoming media creators in addition to hosting media from other sources. With users now expecting high-performance data over mobile connections, data providers have been compelled to build massive, high-performance data centers in many regions to ensure customer satisfaction. This has proven to be an economic boon for switch and equipment providers, as well as to the economies of many small rural markets where the data centers are built. Just 20 years ago, many considered the availability of downloadable music to be just short of a miracle, even though it took 56 minutes per song. Today, kids complain if the high-definition movie they are watching on their phones (from the back seat of a car traveling 70 miles per hour) buffers for more than 10 seconds. Clearly, the world has changed.

Unfortunately, all the life-changing benefits of high-speed mobile data come with a significant security risk. As more and more facets of our personal lives have an associated mobile app, more and more personal data will end up on people's phones. This is a gold mine for would-be thieves, who are way ahead of the average unwitting mobile handset user. For cybercriminals who have honed their skills against trained IT adversaries, the average person who may or may not know anything at all about cybersecurity is no match at all. For the IT security specialist, this would be nothing more than a cautionary tale—except for the fact that many of these same unwitting users have access to corporate servers.

Most big-city tourists worry about pickpockets taking their wallet, which might contain some cash, a few credit cards, and a picture ID. These same people, however, often fail to consider that if their phone or device were compromised, they could find all their credit cards run up, their bank accounts cleared, and new credit cards issued in their name and maxed out as well. For good measure, the phone might then be sold to a third party on a cybercrime version of eBay (which not only exists, but even has holiday sales) to someone who might then use it to breach the victim's company. This may seem far-fetched, but it's all within the realm of the possible.

Taken from : Wireless and Mobile Device Security