Today’s Chart of the Day from The Business Insider focuses on mobile data traffic and it’s projected 40X growth rate over the next five years.

We’ve been learning that managing network capacity for mobile operators in ALL markets is a major issue and key driver behind looking for more bandwidth efficient ways to deliver data services. This applies just as readily in emerging markets as developed markets.

A primary dynamic in emerging markets is increasing network capacity just to keep pace with subscriber growth, often made more complex by the lack of infrastructure and services in emerging economies. Developed markets might not be growing subscriber numbers significantly these days but the explosion in use of smart phone driven data services, still in its relative infancy, is turning into a major network capacity management headache.

There are immutable ‘laws of physics’ that govern why mobile wireless networking can never deliver the same speeds and capacities as wired networking. And a technical architecture to support mobile web browsing that relies on the wireless delivery of uncompressed HTML mark-up data to chunky browser software on limited hardware capacity mobile devices, and with full page refreshes every time you move forwards or backwards or even stand still whilst checking for small data updates, is inherently less than smart.

It’s not surprising that mobile operators are increasingly looking for ‘smart’ technology solutions that utilize existing network infrastructure much more efficiently AND deliver a superior end-user experience, which to the average mobile user first and foremostly translates to speed, speed, speed…