Order of Magnitude More Bandwidth Needed as Soon as 7 Years From Today

A scramble by mobile service providers to acquire more spectrum is rational, even if some think attempts to maintain artificial scarcity is the real reason for talk of spectrum scarcity. But some think mobile bandwidth demand is going to explode.

Where today 3 Mbps to 16 Mbps would be a normal range of speed for a U.S. consumer user, by 2020, it is quite possible that half of consumers will be buying and using services offering 100 Mbps, as crazy as that might seem. Video is the reason.

Ooyala says the hours spent watching streaming video on tablets and mobile increased 100 percent in 2012.

That mobile viewing of video grew that much should not come as a surprise. For example, a new study sponsored by inMobi found that 50 percent of the average global mobile web users now use mobile as either their primary or exclusive means of using the Internet.

If people are using mobiles as a primary or exclusive way of using the Internet, and if video is one of the most common Internet media types, it is not too surprising that mobile video viewership would be growing, especially as fourth generation networks and bigger screens now make mobile video a more enjoyable experience.

In 2008, Cisco forecast that video would represent half of global bandwidth will be used for consumer video apps of one sort or another by 2012. Those forecasts were not far from the mark.

Video streaming traffic represented 42 percent share of all global bandwidth in the second half of  2011, up from 35 percent in the first half of 2011, Allot Communications.

Overall, global mobile broadband traffic grew by 83 percent in the second half of the year, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 234 percent during the year.

This bandwidth is being dominated by a small percentage of users, though: Arieso has estimated that one percent of mobile subscribers now consume half of all downloaded data, with a third of those subscribers using a smart phone.

In the second half of 2011, YouTube accounted for 57 percent of all global video streaming traffic, meaning that YouTube alone held 24 percent share of global bandwidth. Overall, YouTube traffic grew by 143%, while video streaming traffic rose 88 percent.

Ooyala also says live video is starting to drive viewing not pre-recorded video. Ooyala's data also shows viewers watch live video longer on all devices, suggesting live video is more engaging.

On desktops, viewers watched live video 18 times longer than video on demand content in the fourth quarter of 2012, for example.

About a third of the total time spent watching tablet video in the fourth quarter of 2012 was engagement with  premium, long-form content running more than 60 minutes, Ooyala says.

The percentage of time spent watching  long-form video (over 10 minutes) on tablets

increased 37 percent from the first quarter to the fourth quarter of 2012.

The share of tablet video viewing more than doubled in 2012 as well.

Consumers have demonstrated a clear preference for engaging with content on smart phones using apps, which account for about 80 percent of U.S. mobile time spent interacting with mobile apps, rather than the mobile web, according to comScore.

Mobile channels now account for about 37 percent of all digital media consumption “minutes of use.” PCs might still account for about 63 percent of media consumption, but the mobile share is growing.

Faster mobile access speeds seem to be having a clear impact as well. Typically, users consume more total data on faster connections, compared to slower networks. By the end of 2012, 97.7 percent of U.S. smart phone owners used 3G or 4G enabled devices.

While 3G users still represent the wide majority of the  smart phone market, the number of 4G users grew in 2012 to  33.1 million, up 273 percent from 2011 levels of adoption. 

But 42 percent of all smart phone content consumption happens on a Wi-Fi connection, not the mobile network, comScore also reports.

But the main point is that all current notions of how much bandwidth, and how big a data cap needs to be provided, will be broken, and soon, by video consumption habits and preferences.