In five days, Apple fans in Kenya, Uganda, Botswana and Cameroon will have a reason to celebrate with the launch of iPhone 4s on the 13th of January 2012 in these countries. This was an announcement made by Apple that the company will launch the phone in China and other 21 countries in the world. While this launch is impressive, African mobile operators might have a strain on their networks especially with the addition of new cloud based storage applications on the iPhone 4s smartphone.

The iconic smartphone might be good for users in but comes with a price for the the operators. What is even more jaw-dropping is the rate at which Android and iPhone owners are gobbling up data, this puts pressure on the operators since iPhone 4s users consume twice as much data than the iPhone 4 users and thrice as the iPhone 3Gs users. This means mobile phone operators in Kenya, Uganda, Botswana and Cameroon will be faced with high growth of data volumes to handle.

According to a report published by Arieso, a software vendor that examines the patterns of mobile phone devices says that the Apple family of mobile devices downloads more data than networks can handle. iPhone users are however not the only heavy data consumers, but also owners of Samsung's Galaxy S and S II, as well as the Nexus One and HTC Desire S.

All this makes it clear that the capacity issues plaguing mobile operators around the world will worsen in 2012, Arieso writes in its report. Going forward, the best chance operators have is to bring base stations closer to users by making better use of smaller base stations.

In future mobile operators will need to deploy personalized networks, where the placement of some base stations is driven by the most extreme users. In Kenya, Nokia Siemens Networks introduced liquid networks, a mechanism to channel communication data traffic along paths of least network resistance to get to where it is needed.

Such self organizing network environments provide an automatic scenario for cell stations to react to user behavior that constantly change their network areas. This is by increasing coverage angles especially as the growth in smartphone data usage is clearly being driven by app-friendly operating systems like Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android.

BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7 owners consume far less data, though Windows Phone 7 is still fairly new and the amount of data used per device has been growing in recent months as more apps have become available.

By using parameters generated on the quality of an areas’ network,  these self organizing network environments reduces manual efforts to manage capabilities in relocating existing capacities in smaller geographical areas.

With self organizing network environment, many of today’s network scalability and cost constraints are removed; they help in sale outage compensation.