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Recently Cisco has released a report stating that mobile data traffic in India is expected to increase 114-fold by 2015. It is being estimated that the mobile data traffic in India will augment at a compound annual growth rate of 158 percent. In 2015, Indian users will be generating data that will be equivalent to 15 times the volume of the entire Indian Internet in 2005.
There is going to be a big spurt in high-end smartphones in India. According to Ciscos estimates, India will have more than 1 billion networked devices in four years from now, compared to 570 million in 2010. The thing is that for India and most other countries of the world, the age of the non-smartphone devices has essentially come to an end. By 2015, a vast majority of Indians will own smartphones.
The iPhone effect
The recently launched iPhone 4S is expected to excel in two areas video and gaming. Both of these are great data hogs. Robert Pepper, Ciscos vice president of global technology policy, has recent said that global mobile data traffic growth is expected to increase over the next five years by a 92 percent compound annual growth rate, thanks to video files and, to a lesser extent, mobile gaming.
In USA, people are making fewer and fewer voice calls. Instead, they opt to communicate via e-mail, text messages and social networks. Such communication habits lead to spurt in data consumption. In order ease the load on their networks, many operators in USA have started offering tiered pricing plans, where prices shoot up dramatically if a user exceeds certain data limit. In some cases, operators are even throttling data access to the really heavy users.
The iPhone effect is being felt all over the world. Till 2010 the average monthly traffic among iPhone users in Korea used to be around 360 megabytes. Now it has become double, and it is expected to rise even more. People all over the world are becoming hooked to their smartphones and tablets and this is leading to a phenomenal spurt in data usage.
The hunger for data
A new report released by Ericsson, a company that is into making hardware to mobile phone companies, shows that from the second quarter of 2010 to the second quarter of 2011, mobile data traffic more than doubled. Ericsson has based its analysis on mobile broadband measurements during the second quarter of 2011 at four different operators in mature markets in Europe, Asia and North America.
As defined by Ericsson, an active smartphone user generates more than 1 MB traffic per day. Factors including screen size, age and price of the smartphone have a stronger correlation with median traffic than operating system. The notable thing is that the high-end smartphones in North America generate twice the traffic as compared to smartphones based in Asia and Europe.
Ericsson's head of Business Unit Networks, Johan Wibergh, attributes much of the data usage to users who indulge in video consumption. He says, The implication is that high-end users are driving traffic and demand for prioritised services, which is the reason Ericsson believes tiered pricing models, in combination with traffic management, are key for operators, as well as consumers.
Ericsson has found that among heavy users, the cumulative data generated by video is significantly higher than for other activities. The top 5 to 10 percent of smartphone users are willing to spend up to 40 minutes a day watching online video. However, the average user spends about 30 seconds a day watching online video.
Operators must implement new technology
In order to meet the demands of the burgeoning community of data addicted users, operators must speed up the building of new 4G networks. In India we are expecting that companies like RIL and Airtel will start their 4G services by the end of this year or by early 2012. Operators, everywhere in the world, must insure that the pace of their technological advancements is in line with publics expectations.
Right now the operators, especially in countries like India, are failing in providing users reasonably priced and fast paced data services.
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