"Mobile Internet Phenomena" by Sandvine looks at the state of mobile network and shows that mobile data is becoming main stream, with users relying on mobile broadband to do the same things they do on their PCs. The high-end users eat up the most data. Other top trends such as Facebook, social networking and YouTube, are also contributing to data use.
Voice is consuming an ever smaller percentage of overall mobile network traffic. According to a March report by analyst Chetan Sharma, a member of the GigaOM Pro Analyst Network, U.S. data traffic exceeded voice traffic by almost 400,000 GB in 2009 and that ratio is expected to double this year.
From the Mobile Internet Data Report:
- Globally, the top five percent of subscribers account for 50 percent of network traffic.
- Social networking accounts for up to nine percent of total bytes on any given mobile network.
- Roughly one in five mobile data subscribers regularly use Facebook
YouTube accounts for 10 to 15 percent of total bytes on a given mobile network. - Almost 30 percent of mobile subscribers in Caribbean and Latin America use Facebook in any given hour - the highest percentage of any other region.
- Mobile traffic is becoming similar to fixed line traffic as laptops dominate the airwave.
"A challenge facing mobile operators worldwide is educating
subscribers on application and byte usage," said Mr. Caputo. "Most
usage-based billing plans are purely speed or byte-driven, rather than
event-driven. With Sandvine's solutions, service providers can develop
service tiers that are easily digestible such as 70 YouTube hours per
month rather than 6 Mbps download speed or 25 GB of data per month. This
helps subscribers quantify their usage and continue using the
applications and service they love."
Sandvine predicts that service tiers and plans will evolve to empower
subscribers to design their own personalized plans based on their
specific preferences and usage allowances using a design my plan
function.
Visit www.sandvine.com/news/globalbroadbandtrends.asp for
the executive summary of the 2010 Mobile Internet Phenomena report.