Human Constraints for Mobile Communications

Mobile networks are proliferating currently in the world with a rather high pace. The number of mobile telecom subscribers has already exceeded one billion and the number will exceed two billions before the year 2010. The big investements needed in the telecom infrastructure raise the question, how much revenues can the operators and other players expect from the investments and what would limit them. It was shown earlier that the revenues obtained from human users of mobile networks and services are limited ultimately by the time the users are willing and able to use the services. In this paper we look closer at what are more concretely the limiting factors. The problematics is approached from five different points of views. First we analyse how much data is produced in the world in a time unit. This forms in a way the ultimate limit, because what does not exist cannot be transmitted. Second, the data volumes and types produced in organizations are analysed. This gives basis to estimate how much of the organizationally produced data could be transmitted over a mobile channel. Third, we analyze previous research that investigates how the people allocate their time among various activities, like sleep, work, watching TV, traveling to work or leisure activities, etc. Thus, only a fraction of the time of an individual can be used at the mobile channel. Fourth, cost models for communication capacity use and the key findings based on time users are willing to spend on communicating in private or work context are discussed. Last but not least, limits of human information processing from cognitive viewpoint are analyzed. Based on these + Visiting professor at Waseda Univ. until March 31, 2004. The reseach of this author was supported by Telecom Advancment Organisation of Japan (TAO) through Senior TAO Fellowship. On leave from Univ. of Jyvaskyla, Dept. of Computer Science and Information Systems until June 30, 2003 phone: +358 14 2603040, fax: 2603011. different viewpoints we analyse their interdependencies and pinpoint questions that should be analysed further while determining the economic feasibility of the mobile networks.