Yannick Noah was the last Frenchman to win the French Open men’s singles title. That was in 1983. This past summer, that long streak was in jeopardy as Parisian Gaël Monfils advanced to the quarterfinals. His opponent at Roland Garros would be the great Roger Federer on the afternoon of Wednesday the 3^rd of June. Important sporting events usually happen at night or on the weekend to draw the largest television audience. But this match took place in mid-afternoon on a weekday - when most Parisians were miles from their television sets. The parks, restaurants, and coffee shops of Paris filled with people watching the match on iPhones or other smart-phones. France’s Orange network carried more traffic that day than any previous day, thanks to all that streaming video.

That story was told by Vivek Badrinth; EVP Networks, Carriers, Platforms, and Infrastructure for France Telecom Group; at the Wireless Influencers conference in San Diego last month. Mr. Badrinth says we live in a time of “paradise for network planners” because no one with good network planning skills will be without work for many years to come.

Not very long ago, Mother’s Day was the most important day of the year to telecom network planners. Everyone calls Mom, so the number and duration of calls was higher than on any other day. Network planners could forecast the demand and plan to have plenty of capacity so that Moms were not disappointed. If network planners messed up, well they had 365 days to get ready for the next year. Now Mother’s day is just like any other day for network planners. They call their Mom just like everyone else, but their job is not complicated by all these voice calls. Voice calls are now just a fraction of network bandwidth. They are also very predictable compared to data traffic, especially streaming video. Sorry Mom, you are still special - but your day isn’t.

Network bandwidth goes through cycles. Sometimes, technology advances very fast and we have a glut. This happened early in the decade when predictions about Internet demand were overly optimistic and too much fiber optic cable was in the ground. Many firms went bankrupt and customers enjoyed cheap prices. During a glut, it is more economical for customers to add bandwidth than to carefully manage what they’re using. At other times, users demand bandwidth more quickly than network operators can deploy it. Regulators often compound the shortage because things like spectrum reform take a long time to enact. Now, wireless networks are entering a period of capacity constraint. Customers are in love with iPhones and Blackberries, and a steady stream of data-hungry mobile devices and applications are targeted at consumers. Economists will tell you that the normal reaction to a shortage is to raise prices until the shortage clears. That probably won’t happen for wireless network operators. The market is too competitive and customers have shown a clear preference for flat-rate pricing. A range of new technologies including LTE, WiMax, Picocells, and FemtoCells promise to relieve the shortage. These all have either huge capital costs or challenges in market adoption and management.

The times we are in may very well be paradise for network planners, but only the good ones. The ones that fail to match demand with capacity will either lose customers or have an uncompetitive cost structure. Poor planning will leave an operator with excess bandwidth where customer demand is low, and bandwidth constraint in the most critical areas. To live in this paradise, network planners need the best business analytics they can get. They need SAS.

On that day at Rolland Garros, Roger Federer was too much for the young Mr. Monfils. The French were able to enjoy this match on their mobile device wherever they happened to be. That technology is as new today as television was in 1950. For the network planners at Orange the day provided a lesson on capacity management for the smart-phone era. Today, only a small fraction of mobile devices are capable of real-time streaming video. In a few short years the majority will be. Network planners may soon be so busy they will forget to call Mom on Mother’s day.