Submitted by NetScout's Eileen Haggerty, Director of Product Marketing
So how did you spend your weekend? Were you in line to get one of the new iPhone 3Gs? Looks like a lot of folks were given that 1 million have already been sold in just 3 days. Yahoo News "Apple sells 1 million iPhones in first 3 days"
That’s potentially a million new mobile IP users that AT&T is going to need to support – no small challenge if you consider simply the activation challenges that ensued over the weekend. Ongoing services performance for everything from music downloads to web surfing to VoIP calls will also need to be managed and monitored to keep the subscribers satisfied.
The early indications of the enhancements delivered in this version of the iPhone for 3GSM Mobile Operator networks are very positive. Overall voice quality sound is better, storage is greater, and the features are certainly richer - Beta News "The new apps for iPhone 2.0: What's good?"
NetScout had done a survey in late December 2007 about what people thought would be “hot” in the coming year(2008). And number one on the question of consumer technologies in vogue was Smart Phones/iPhones. So the outpouring of interested consumers was not a surprise. The good news in this survey, as industry analyst Jim Metzler pointed out in his IT Impact Brief “Where’s the Heat”, was that the respondents were not particularly worried about the impact of Smart Phones and iPhones on their corporate networks. I imagine the network engineers feel that the traffic changes to their own internal network will be minimal for now.
The wireless service providers world-wide, on the other hand, can leverage tools like NetScout’s nGenius Performance Management System for Service Providers to help provide IP-enabled service assurance. Such carriers will be prepared to support more than just basic services and applications, e.g. VoIP, but also be in a position to handle customer facing services like web.
What do you think now? Is the iPhone and Smart Phones in general still “hot” technology? Are you concerned about impact on your corporate networks? Are you concerned about performance of these phones and services on your carrier’s network? We’d like to hear your thoughts.
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