iGR’s new report, Localized U.S. Bandwidth Demand Forecast, 2011-2016, indicates that overall bandwidth consumption is increasing and will continue to increase during peak usage hours. It suggests a re-engineering of the network architecture to cope with future demand.

With the technology landscape changing, smartphones and tablets becoming ubiquitous, 3G and 4G networks materializing, Wi-Fi ‘hotspots’ becoming popular, daily usage patterns have begun to shift significantly.

According to the report, this is evident in the peaking patterns of the use of mobile voice networks. What was once a ‘morning and evening phenomenon’ has now shifted to becoming a ‘lunch time and early afternoon’ one.

“With data-intensive smartphones and tablets, as well as improved displays, battery life and network connectivity, our research shows that people are more likely to ‘sit, browse and view’ rather than just walk and talk or send a few e-mails,” said Iain Gillott, president at iGR, in a press release.

While new technologies can adequately handle the average level of traffic during a typical day, the cellular data network would be stressed to cope with high traffic areas at specific times during the day. Pointing this out, iGR research states that this will call for a different approach to network architecture.

Gillott noted that the increasing availability and deployment of LTE (News - Alert) to meet excess bandwidth is insufficient as improving efficiency and throughput cannot be handled by LTE deployments alone. The report suggests that re-engineering of the network architecture at the macro level coupled with new network architecture considerations be made a part of a carrier’s deployment roadmap.

With a heterogeneous network in place, carriers will be positioned better to prepare for future demands from more robust devices and data-intensive applications.