At CES in Las Vegas, FCC chair warns of mobile ‘spectrum crunch’–for the third time! (CNET – January 12th). By the very nature of it, spectrum is physically limited and even if the addition of spectrum will provide some relief, the wireless industry also needs to look at other solutions to mitigate the risk of network congestion.

The massive migration from the internet to everything mobile combined with the proliferation of content moved to the cloud is placing an unprecedented burden on wireless networks. No industry has ever experienced such a growth without major transformation. Adding capacity has obviously to be part of the solution but what about making more efficient the thousands of apps and cloud services that are flooding the mobile ecosystem through app stores?

Many would argue that app developers should not have to develop expertise on network efficiency and should be provided with more tools and guidance on how to building well behaved apps when it comes to bandwidth and signaling consumption on the network. In parallel, carriers, device manufacturers and other players have recognized that it’s impossible to fix the problem by optimizing one application at a time. Motorola’s CEO Jha on the topic: “We work very closely with developers directly to test applications and optimize applications for our devices, but given the volume of apps available on Android Market, it is unrealistic for us to test them all.”

So what’s left? Solutions like SEVEN Open Channel™ address the challenge of network congestion in a holistic way across all apps by simply eliminating unnecessary traffic and bringing the content closer to the end user. Check it out: Open Channel reduces signaling by up to 40% bringing immediate relief to carriers that struggle with capacity issues.