Mobile data traffic equivalent to over 10 billion Blu-ray movies will be generated by mobile gadgets, including smartphones, featurephones and tablets over the next four years, a new report claims.
According to a new study conducted by Juniper Research, dubbed ‘Digital Advertising: Online, Mobile & Wearables 2015-2019’, mobile traffic generated between this year and 2019 will reach almost 197,000 petabytes. However, the research claims that only 41 percent of the data generated by these devices will be carried over cellular networks by 2019, with the majority of mobile data traffic offloaded to Wi-Fi networks.
“Certainly, video is forming an ever-greater proportion of network traffic. For example, Juniper Research anticipates that video traffic over smartphones will increase by nearly 8 times between 2014 and 2019”, noted research author Nitin Bhas.
The data showed that video currently accounts for around 60% of global IP traffic and, in some developed markets; this proportion is likely to exceed 70% in two to three years.
The report also revealed that in 2014, data traffic generated by smartphones, featurephones and tablets in the Far East & China exceeded that of North America for the first time.
The study observed that Wi-Fi has now become an integral part of operators’ network strategy.
“Wi-Fi is not just being used for data offload, but also to maintain call connection quality in challenging network topologies. For example, EE UK launched its Wi-Fi calling feature on a selected number of handsets in April 2015,” Bhas added.
The leading market research firm estimates that the average monthly data usage by smartphone and tablet users will double over the next four years. The daily media consumption by mobile users will continue to rise, bolstered by the rise in 4G adoption and factors such as HD video usage.
Juniper also predicts that the onloaded M2M traffic will significantly increase over the forecast period, primarily driven by telematics and connected car infotainment systems.
The Wi-fi Calling Operators whitepaper is available to download from the Juniper website together with further details of the research.
