My, how times have changed since the day people picked up the phone just to connect with their friends, colleagues and family. Voice calls are a thing of the past for the new Generation Mobile, with one-third of this population preferring SMS over voice calls with its simple and fast, albeit impersonal, communication. This, according to recent research by Nielsen, which points to the fact that there is an entire generation with mobile embedded in their DNA. The mobile phone is merely an extension of them, used to facilitate communication and conduct business and is not a luxury item as it was for previous generations.

This generation of text and data hungry users is connected in every sense; text-to-talk, group chat, video chat, social networking, image and video sharing and thousands and thousands of SMS messages, over 3,400 per month! Not only is this an entirely new connected mobile generation, but it introduces an entirely new set of challenges for operators to cope with the data demands associated with Generation Mobile. The explosion in smartphone data has been a hot topic, having increased 89% from 2010 to 2011 according to Nielsen, but what is to come is the generation of mobile users rising out of this environment-US teens have tripled their data usage since Nielsen’ previous report just 12 months ago. With this dramatic rise in app and data usage, the threat to mobile networks is expected to grow if a viable solution is not provided.

Existing traffic optimization solutions that address the data demands of Generation Mobile provide relief to operators by optimizing bandwidth consumption for video or providing network offloading, but fail to take into consideration all of the traffic that is a result of the chatty of mobile apps that have surfaced. Often the discussion around these solutions doesn’t address signaling a type of traffic congesting wireless networks with many always-on smartphone applications generating eight times as much signaling traffic as laptops.

SEVEN has a solution for operators signaling challenges with Open Channel™, a mobile traffic optimization solution specifically designed to address signaling without impacting the end-user experience. Not only does Open Channel minimize signaling by up to 40% on wireless networks, it also addresses data traffic, reducing it by 70%. This means relief to operators and to Generation Mobile who crave enormous amounts of data.