DL - 4G Americas

4 THE GROWING DEMANDS FOR WIRELESS DATA APPLICATIONS
“Mobile voice service is already considered a necessity by many, and mobile data, video,
and TV services are now becoming an essential part of consumers’ lives. Mobile
subscribers are growing rapidly and bandwidth demand due to data and video is
increasing. Mobile machine-to-machine (M2M) connections continue to increase. The
next five years are projected to provide unabated mobile video adoption despite the
recent economic downturn. Operators are rolling out increased bandwidth through
Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE), Evolution-Data Optimized (EV-DO),
High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA), and related upgrades. There is a need
for backhaul capacity to increase in order for mobile broadband, data access, and video
services to engage the end consumer as well as keep costs in check.” 23
Data traffic is now significantly more than the voice traffic. 24 With the success factors of high-speed
mobile broadband networks, Internet-friendly handheld devices (smartphones) and a wide variety of
applications in place, consumer adoption curves for wireless data are showing the “hockey stick” effect on
charts and, as wireless voice ARPU hits the flat rate ceiling, data ARPU is proving to be the next big
growth engine for mobile operators.
Petabytes Per Month
4000
3500
3000
2500
2000
1500
1000
500
0
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
Year
Figure 4.1. Global Mobile Data Growth. 25
In its annual Visual Networking Index Forecast 2009-2014, Cisco Systems reported that global IP traffic
will increase more than fourfold to 767 exabytes by 2014 and video will represent more than 91 percent of
23 Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update 2009-2014, Cisco, 9 February 2010.
24 US Mobile Data Market Update Q2 2010, Chetan Sharma, 10 August 2010.
25 Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, Cisco, 9 February 2010.
www.4gamericas.org February 2011 Page 29