Mobile operators are going to run out of bandwidth as people start to use their networks for demanding applications like video calls and even Voice over IP, analysts and industry experts warned today.

Joel Stradling, senior business telecom specialist at Current Analysis, said data traffic will grow by 100 percent per year or even more as 3G services upgraded to faster High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA).

He warned: “The sky is the limit for data communication from mobile devices.”

Operators face the possibility that their revenues will not keep pace with the cost of the “backhaul” – the core infrastructure that carries the non-wireless data. They will either have to lease more bandwidth or upgrade existing infrastructure, Standling told the NetEvents forum at Evian, near Geneva.

Bob Mandeville, head of Iometrix Systems , said one answer was to implement carrier Ethernet, which makes more efficient uses of existing infrastructure by using similar technology that used on local area networks.

“The value proposition is very simple… lots of very cheap bandwidth,” said Mandeville, who works with the Metro Ethernet Forum organization.

But he said there were a number of quality of service problems that had to be addressed when carrying multi-media data streams.

*There’ll be more in our Test Bed blog over the next couple of days about some of the companies building next-generation networks