Dean Bubley is one of the most interesting contrarian thinkers in the mobile space, and all of his work is worthy of consideration whether you agree with his conclusions or not. He’s critical of LTE and social networking, for example, but he has good reasons for both positions. On his blog today Dean continues his examination of mobile data traffic management options:

It’s only been about 2 months since I published my recent Disruptive Analysis research paper analysing 10 different technological approaches to managing mobile broadband traffic – offloading, compression, policy management and so forth.

The main pitch of the document was that so many silos have evolved so quickly, that very few network operators are able to view all the options holistically. There are numerous cases of one “fix” simply shifting the problem elsewhere in the network – unintended consequences abound.

Yet on an ongoing basis, I’m being presented with yet more alternatives to either manage data traffic, or avoid its existence in the first place.

This posting deals with some specific solutions that achieve offload by hybrid approaches. I suspect that hybrid approaches with some caching and some alternate paths – like Wi-Fi – will provide an important part of the long-term solution to the mobile data crunches. And I use the plural because there are multiple bottlenecks that each have to be solved independently. It’s not strictly a spectrum problem, in other words, because regional collectors, backhaul networks, and core networks are all subject to overload.