Ericsson Mobility Report said the rising number of smartphone subscriptions and data consumption will result in an 8-fold increase in traffic by 2020.
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Total mobile data traffic is expected to rise at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of around 40 percent.
The growth in data traffic between 2019 and 2020 will be greater than the total sum of all mobile data traffic up to the end of 2013. Factors such as data plans, user device capabilities and network performance all impact data consumption per subscriber.
Asia Pacific will generate 50 percent of smartphone traffic by the end of 2020. Monthly smartphone data consumption per active subscription in Asia Pacific (3.2 GB) will only be 50 percent of that in North America (6.0 GB) and Western Europe (6.5 GB). However, the Asia Pacific region will have the largest share of total smartphone traffic in 2020, due to subscription growth.
In many mobile networks today, 40-60 percent of video traffic is from YouTube. Mobile video will grow by around 45 percent annually through to 2020, when it will account for around 55 percent of all mobile data traffic, said Ericsson.
Consumers increasingly prefer app-based mobile use over web browsing. Music streaming is gaining popularity, but functions such as content caching and offline playlists limit the impact on traffic growth. However, audio traffic is still expected to increase in line with total mobile traffic growth.
Globally, the top five apps generate a large portion of all mobile traffic. In the US, South Korea and Spain, top five apps included social networking and video streaming. The US list included Netflix, while South Korea had TV app AfreecaTV and search portal NAVER. The top five apps accounted for around two-thirds of all app traffic.
global mobile broadband subscriptions account for a growing share of all broadband subscriptions.
Mobile broadband will play a complementary role to fixed broadband in some segments, and replace it in others. Most mobile broadband devices are, and will continue to be, smartphones.
800 million smartphone subscriptions were added in 2014. By 2016 the number of smartphone subscriptions will exceed those for basic phones.
