Elusive for more than a decade, mobile data service is beginning to move into the consumer mainstream, industry executives say. In the past six months, the largest European mobile operators, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Orange and O2, which is owned by the Spanish company Telefonica, have reported surges in mobile data traffic on their networks, fueled by data-hungry devices like the iPhone from Apple, and by multimedia downloads over their Web portals.
The spike in demand has been so sudden that operators like Vodafone, Swisscom and Telecom Italia have had to spend millions upgrading the microwave and fiber links from cell base stations to their core networks to unclog data bottlenecks, according to the manufacturers which have sold them the necessary equipment.
Source: NewsFactor, http://www.newsfactor.com