Smartphones are rapidly becoming ubiquitous, but they risk becoming a victim of their own success, so clogging networks they are unable to do many of the smart applications that fuelled their sales.
Analysts warn that the mobile industry soon faces growing pains, with congestion choking service at peak times and locations, and operators forced to hike prices and capping or slowing data use.
In either case many popular services that have driven smartphone sales could suffer.
Mobile industry leaders recognise this threat and it will be one of the key questions they address this coming week at their annual gathering.
More than 50,000 people from over 1,300 companies are set to attend the four-day Mobile World Congress opening Monday in Barcelona, including executives from dozens of top firms.
Sales of smartphones have rocketed over the past few years -- nearly 470 million of them sold in the past two years according to Gartner market research firm -- and developing nifty applications for them has become a major industry in itself.
But with each smartphone generating as much as 24 times as much data traffic as a regular mobile phone the volume of network traffic has exploded, with the network firm Cisco forecasting it to grow 26-fold by 2015.
Mobile operators have been hard pressed to keep up.
"The explosion in data traffic and the strain on networks is beginning to show with service quality already suffering," Torbjoern Sandberg , chief executive of Birdstep mobile connectivity firm, said in a recent statement.
While spectacular overloading of networks such as with AT&T in the United States and 02 in Britain in December 2009 -- which the carrier linked to smartphone use -- is rare, users more often encounter dropped calls and slower service at rush hour or in crowded public transport.
"Bandwidth congestion will continue to be a serious problem for operators, especially in the most populated areas during peak usage times," said Merav Bahat of Flash Networks, a company which helps operators improve network performance.
"It will not render smartphones dumb, but it will frustrate users who expect a wireline-like experience on their mobile device," she added.
Congestion hits first the bandwith-hogging and most popular smartphone application -- video.
Video streaming already accounts for 37 percent of mobile data traffic, according to the latest Mobile Trends Report by Allot Communication, and Cisco expects video to account for two-thirds of traffic by 2015.
But frequent interruptions would render video streaming nearly unusable at peak traffic times.
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