Mobile  data  traffic  growth

Mobile traffic is globally soaring, and its rate of growth is accelerating, due to the ever-increasing number of data consumer devices, such as smartphones and tablets. The average data use of those mobile users is also rising. Average smartphone usage grew 81 percent in 2012. The average amount of traffic per smartphone in 2012 was 342 MB per month, up from 189 MB per month in 2011, according to the Cisco Visual Networking Index, 2013 (VNI). The heavy investments in new technologies – 4G (fourth generation), LTE (Long Term Evolution) – will not provide immediate network capacity, since the terminal market is still dominated by 3G devices.

We can see on the two tables below the global Internet traffic growth from 1997 to 2001 and the global mobile data traffic growth from 2008 to 2012. We observe that the growth figures are close, so the analysts might use this pattern to make some reliable forecasts for the coming years.

Table 1: Global Internet traffic growth from 1997 to 2001

1997 178%

1998 124%

1999 128%

2000 195%

2001 133%

Source: Cisco, VNI mobile, 2013.

Table 2: Global mobile data traffic growth from 2008 to 2012

2008 156%

2009 140%

2010 159%

2011 115%

2012 70%

Source: Cisco, VNI mobile, 2013.

The number of powerful smartphones and tablets will increase exponentially, resulting in more mobile data consumption. This will require a major development in mobile cloud computing, as most of the traffic will result in cloud-based services. In the Cisco VNI:

Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update 2012-2017, there are clear indications of an explosion in mobile data traffic:

- Global mobile data traffic will increase 13 fold between 2012 and 2017. Mobile data traffic will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 66 percent from 2012 to 2017, reaching 11.2 exabytes per month by 2017.

- Smartphones represented only 18 percent of total global handsets in use in 2012, but represented 92 percent of total global handset traffic

- In 2012, the number of mobile-connected tablets increased 2.5 fold to 36 million, and each tablet generated 2.4 times more traffic than the average smartphone.

- IPhone and Android platforms generate most of the smartphone data use, but Android is now higher than iPhone.

- We expect mobile data traffic to increase by 13 times between 2012 and 2017.

- Two-thirds of the world's mobile data traffic will be video by 2017.

- The second largest segment is mobile Web/Data. These two sources will be responsible for almost 90% of the total mobile data traffic.

- There will be 788 million mobile-only Internet users by 2015.

On the graph below, we can see the expectation of mobile data traffic within 2017.

Figure 1: Global mobile data traffic forecasts from 2012 to 2017 Source: Cisco, VNI mobile, 2013.

These figures highlight the fact that users have changed their way to use mobile services, and that the use of the Internet tends to be more and more a mobile use rather than a fixed one. Also, new powerful devices and new services will continue to push users to consume more and more data with their mobile devices. As we said it before, data consumption through mobile networks started when smartphones were released. These new devices provided a new generation interface and the access to mobile services and features that used to be available only at home. However, it is important to say that the nature of a device is deeply related to its data consumption. For example, the smart tablets have a screen resolution much higher than usual smart phones, so they need to receive much more data from the network in order to make up for this additional information need.

The devices responsible for this traffic are widely diversifying. Traffic from smartphones is going to exceed traffic from laptops, which have been by far the main driver of mobile data traffic for years. The following graph gives some estimation about how data traffic data traffic will be distributed among devices within 2017.

Figure 2: Mobile data traffic distribution over different kind of devices Source: Cisco, VNI mobile, 2013.

These multiple categories of devices generate different traffic loads. Cisco forecasts state that smartphones will be responsible for just over 67% of all global mobile data traffic in 2017. Laptops will have dropped to 14% of the traffic in 2017, as they generated 45% of the data traffic in 2012. Tablets will have risen to almost 12%. And even if non-smartphones will be by far the most numerous existing devices, they will generate just 1.4% of all mobile traffic in five years. Indeed, if we compare the mobile data traffic distribution over different kind of devices to the number of devices connected (see on the following figure), we notice that the most numerous connected devices are not the ones responsible for the majority of traffic loads.

Figure 3: Global mobile devices and connections growth Source: Cisco, VNI mobile, 2013.

Regarding these impressive figures and statements, we may wonder how this traffic explosion will impact mobile network. Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) will be severely challenged to provide the required capacity expansion in their network to avoid network congestion.

One consequence is that MNOs data subscription packages will need to change from the current ones. Income generated from data use will proportionally not follow data traffic expansion. Thus, they need to come up with new solutions and other consumer subscription offers. According to ABI Research, data revenues will only grow at a CAGR of about 15 to 18 percent until 2015, while data traffic is expected to have a 42 percent CAGR rate. This may lead to the end of “Unlimited” data packages.

Data consumption also depends on the kind of service used by the consumer. Some applications require more high data rate and/or lower latency, such as real-time services.

These features are very important to improve user experience as much as possible. So mobile operators are now faced to new challenges, they need to analyze their customers

habits regarding mobile access and use. The aim of this is to meet quality and reliability requirements.

As mentioned before, most of the traffic within the next few years will result in cloud-based services, and two-thirds of the world's mobile data traffic will be video by 2017.

Those real-time services are critical issues for operators because they reflect the most the quality of service for the consumer point of view. These services do not accept any data rate insufficiency or latency. Operators will need to come up with innovative solutions to comply with those requirements.

Many Internet video applications are listed as cloud applications, so mobile cloud traffic and video growths are quite similar. Mobile devices are limited in terms of memory and speed whereas cloud applications and services such as Netflix, YouTube, Pandora, and Spotify allow mobile users to overcome the memory capacity and processing power limitations of mobile devices. Cloud applications’ share of mobile data traffic will be 84 percent in 2017 (see in Figure 6) Mobile cloud traffic will grow 14 fold from 2012 to 2017, which corresponds to a 70 percent annual growth rate.

Figure 4: Mobile cloud traffic growth from 2012 to 2017 Source: Cisco, VNI Mobile, 2013.