As your post rightly points out, the advent of the smart phone is turning the CSP’s world upside down. CSPs are struggling with this technological breakthrough because a typical smart phone uses 40 times the amount of data consumption than a simple voice and text message mobile phone at the turn of the millennium. Even more surprising, 3G laptop cards and the 3G iPad tablet consume around 400 times more data than an old fashioned mobile phone! More than ever, service providers need end-to-end visibility of not only the performance of the infrastructure, but also the quality of experience the customer has, and the bandwidth that the customer is consuming. My company, InfoVista, sees the ability to proactively identify the most critical impacts to service before customers experience them as key to the success of service providers in this new age of video streaming and other bandwidth-hungry applications.
Hmmm
"... mobile video will generate roughly 2.4 Exabytes/month. A big number, no doubt, but not that much to scream about."
Isn't that like saying "squeezing a camel though the eye of a needle wouldn't give the camel much of an issue..."
2.4 exabytes a month is fine if you have the infrastructure and management capabilities to handle it.