The Great Bandwidth Brawl

Wireless carriers are increasingly looking for creative tactics that will relieve pressure on their networks.

"Spectrum is certainly a limiting factor, but carriers are also constrained by a number of other things, too, particularly backhaul," says Bill Moore of RootMetrics, which gathers data on cell-phone network bandwidth and other performance measures that are freely available online. Backhaul refers to the physical connections that link cell-phone towers to the Internet and phone networks. All carriers are working hard to upgrade their backhaul, replacing copper cable with high-capacity optical fiber.

Getting the necessary permissions to replace or install underground fiber is a slow process, says Bryan Darr, CEO of Mosaik Solutions, which collects data on wireless network coverage. That explains Verizon's alliance with a consortium of major cable companies to connect their networks, announced late last year. "The cable operators have an awful lot of cable in the ground that's capable of handling a lot of traffic," says Darr. "They also know themselves that they need to be connected to the wireless industry because that's where the future of content like TV is." A way to sidestep bottlenecks caused by constraints on spectrum and backhaul is to have smart phones and tablets make use of Wi-Fi as much as possible, says Darr.