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As more people consume mobile data, carriers will need to take action to prevent their mobile broadband businesses from becoming unprofitable, overloaded dumb pipes.

Cisco estimates that data traffic will grow to 63 times its volume in 2008 by 2013, while a report out from Acision, a company that provides messaging and network management products for operators, estimates that the number of subscriptions will increase only seven-fold between 2008 and 2013. What's grim for carriers about the Cisco report is that it speculates that mobile broadband users will seek the same type of services that wired broadband users consume. As more people are consuming more mobile data, it's those who are using the PC-like devices that could cause problems. People tend to use mobile broadband on such devices as if they were using wired connections, which means they expect to use high-bandwidth applications such as streaming HD video.