With the slow rise of infrastructure supporting LTE networks, more-and-more manufacturers are building into the Internet of Things, and this means further pressure on wireless carriers to support the upcoming onslaught. On one hand, the Internet is facing a resource crisis when it comes to the IPv4 address space drying up; but on the other hand wireless carriers will also have to look into bulking up their total capacity to handle all that customers want to use them for.

As applications for wireless devices increase, so does customer interest in them and it behooves carriers and outlets to stick with the trends. Right now, operators and carriers are only aware of how many minutes a customer users, and how much bandwidth they’ve burned, but doesn’t have an idea what they’ve used it for.

The company, Brightstar, seeks to help wireless stores predict the latest trends in smartphone sales and customer behavior in order to help them better stock their stores by analyzing wireless usage. According to their spotlight coming from Mobile World Conference 2011, they’ve got over 30 IT tools to aid these discoveries available,

Brightstar understands that operators must focus on building and running networks. They need help managing handsets and the many other devices that use those networks.

“We see some opportunities,” said Jeff Gower, president of Brightstar’s operator services unit. “The level of understanding consumer behavior that a retailer needs to know could increase significantly. Operators may have to really work with consumers to educate them.”

Brightstar offers a platform of services to operators to help them understand how consumers use physical devices, Gower said. It is building new platforms to do the same for services and applications.

Today, an operator knows how many voice minutes a smartphone customer uses and how many kilobytes a month. But the operator lacks knowledge of what applications the customer downloads or how she uses them.

“To date, applications communities really try to protect that information and keep the operator in the dark,” Gower said. “We believe the operator needs to be part of that story.”

In their press text it asks the question: “And the biggest question of all: can operators avoid seeing their high-speed networks turn into nothing more than dumb pipes with lots of bandwidth and commodity status?” I believe this happens to be both a yes and a no. Part of the problem is that wireless operators and carriers are in fact left in the dark about what customers largely use their networks for due to the fact that wireless operators aren’t the only people out there that want to tap into customer data (bad guys do too.) Wireless itself is in fact a commodity network of bandwidth; carriers and operators can make themselves more enticing by offering stronger throughput, better coverage, more reliability, et cetera, but to attempt to step beyond that they’d also have to offer their own application services more so than spy on the 3^rd party applications.

Brightstar may be seeking a happy medium here by offering a wide variety of IT analysis tools to wireless operators so that they can make broad-brush guesses about customer behavior. They seek to collect giant amounts of statistical information about wireless use, combine it with regional sales, plan expectations, and probably other factors like current popularity of handsets on the market to aid both individual stores and company wide distribution.

In Brightstar’s offer we’re seeing the tip of the iceberg sighted by Scott Yara of Greenplum when he pointed out that Big Data—which these IT tools represent an application thereof—happens to be the next big thing.

Things that might fall out of this could be that customers in downtown Scottsdale, AZ seem to be extremely likely to purchase smartphones with strong GPS and mapping capability and the apps to support it. A new phone is coming out with all of these features, perhaps it’s a good time to either offer a deal on this new smartphone for upgrade or stock extra. A big game is coming up in Buffalo, CO and the last time over 30% of the customers of a particular operator tapped into streaming video and bought tickets online—they might want to both make a deal with a video carrier to get premium coverage for their customers for that game (and push it to them) and possibly offer upgrades on smartphones with powerful streaming video capability.

The marketing benefits of using Big Data and cloud-computing to crunch customer behavior scenarios is extremely lucrative for companies with lots of products, many regions, and a vast source of data (i.e. customers usage and purchasing habits over time by region.) We’ve seen this sort of leverage spoken about before at the Strata Conference with the Heritage Health Prize.