Imagine a Highway designed with the flexibility to add few extra lanes at rush hour to cope with increased traffic. Imagine being rerouted around a bottleneck so seamlessly that you were unaware of the diversion. Imagine being able to drive all the way around the [London orbital] M25 in top gear. Imagine achieving all that and saving money too. Building a highway network is a thankless task - by the time you've finished, the amount of traffic has more often than not exceeded your planned capacity level. So out come the road works, in come the delays and the complaints, and up goes the cost. Mobile communications networks have exactly the same issues of fluctuating capacity and unexpected traffic peaks. But unlike the frustrated highway driver, the mobile subscriber can choose to leave a network that provides a less than satisfactory experience, and join a competitor. Keep the subscribers happy, and you keep their revenue.
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