Broadcom has another caching idea: The company equips its cellular base station processors to identify and cache multimedia content while sending it out to client devices. The idea is to keep filling the "time slots" on a wireless pipe that the network allocates for the file transfer. Letting those slots go unfilled wastes network capacity. Broadcom's chips can store enough packets of a file or a multimedia stream in memory so that the base station can pack as much data as possible into every time slot devoted to that application, Roy said.

10. Reducing signaling traffic

In some cases, it isn't mobile video or big email attachments that are consuming an operator's spectrum, but small signals sent between devices and networks. With busy applications such as push email, social networking and even Web browsers, these small signals can add up.

"We've seen cases where carriers had lots of data capacity ... available in their network and congestion being defined by signaling capacity limits," said Peter Carson, a senior director of marketing at Qualcomm. He expects the problem to get worse.

In its mobile modem chips, Qualcomm is implementing several technologies that reduce signaling. One is a more efficient way for applications to request network resources and switch between communication modes. Another helps the modem to combine network requests and data traffic from a device's application processor in batches. These techniques also tend to slash power consumption, extending battery life. They should be available soon in devices equipped with Qualcomm modems, Carson said.