UMTS: Alive and Well - 4G Americas

The top 10 consumer mobile applications in 2012 will include: money transfer, Location-BasedServices (LBS), mobile search, mobile browsing, mobile health monitoring, mobile payment, NearField Communication (NFC) services, mobile advertising, mobile instant messaging and mobilemusic (See Appendix B for more detailed information).As previously covered in this section, data traffic is expected to grow significantly. ABI Researchexpects the volume of mobile data sent and received every month by users around the world willexceed by a significant amount the total data traffic for all of 2008. 54 “When people think of mobiledata they think of BlackBerry and iPhone handsets,” ABI senior analyst Jeff Orr said. “But thebulk of today’s traffic is generated by laptops with PC Card and USB modems.” While add-oncellular modems represented two-thirds of traffic in 2008, computers with embedded 3G/4Gmodems will lead in 2014 with more than 50 percent of the world’s mobile data traffic. Other keyfindings from the ABI include: nearly 74 percent of the world’s mobile data traffic will be from Weband Internet access by 2014; by the same time, 26 percent will come from audio and videostreaming. Peer-to-peer file sharing and VoIP contribution to overall mobile data traffic will be lessthan 1 percent. Video streaming will experience the fastest growth of any IP traffic type at aCAGR of 62 percent between 2008 and 2014. 55Additionally, Cisco predicts that the biggest driver for the traffic increase will be video traffic,which they expect will account for roughly 64 percent of all mobile data traffic in 2013. In 2008,video traffic averaged around 13,000 TB per month, or roughly 39 percent of all mobile traffic. By2013, video traffic will increase by more than 100 times and will average around 1.3 million TBper month. 56Direct and indirect revenues from mobile applications are expected to exceed $25 billion by 2014,with growth fueled by a raft of store launches targeting both high-end and mass market handsets,according to a report from Juniper Research. 57 The mobile applications report found that whilethe overwhelming majority of application (app) revenues were accrued from one-off downloads,the increasing utilization of in-app billing to enable incremental revenues from additional mobilecontent will see value-added services (VAS) providing the dominant revenue stream by 2011. Italso noted that many tier one operators would seek to deploy their own app stores in a bid tomaintain content revenue share.However, the Juniper mobile applications report stressed that in the longer term, the greater thebenefits operators would derive from data revenues associated with app usage rather than fromthe retail price of apps and content - providing that the operators rejected the walled gardenapproach. According to report author Dr. Windsor Holden, "Data revenue growth is dependentupon operators embracing policies which enable open access - a policy which also involvesfacilitating app stores which compete with their on-portal offerings."According to a study released by Frank N. Magid Associates, 51 percent of mobile phone usersaccess content using their mobile phones on a weekly basis. Furthermore, mobile content users54 In 2014 Monthly Mobile Data Traffic Will Exceed 2008 Total, ABI Research, 4 August 2009.55 Ibid.56 Cisco: Mobile data traffic to grow 66-fold by 2013, Network World, 11 February 2009.57 Mobile Application Revenues to reach $25bn by 2014 as Apps Stores Hit Mass Market, Juniper Report finds, Cellular-News, 28 April 2009.www.3GAmericas.org February 2010 Page 35