Real Time Entertainment Nears 55% of Total Mobile Data Consumption

Between September 2011 and March 2012, real-time entertainment came to account for more than 50 percent of mobile traffic in the United States. 

And such traffic already represents more than 58 percent of total downstream traffic on fixed networks in North America, according to Sandvine.

And since large file downloads or peer-to-peer traffic sources are relatively rare apps for users on mobile networks, real-time entertainment video will be the dominant driver of bandwidth demand on mobile networks in the future as well.

But audio streaming also is becoming significant. Pandora, for example, accounted for about five percent of downstream mobile traffic in 2012.  

Real-time entertainment will cross the 60 percent threshold in late 2014 or early 2015 before leveling out at about 70 percent of total mobile traffic, Sandvine predicts.

So it would be reasonable to suggest that sometime in 2013, real-time entertainment traffic could grow to about 55 percent of total mobile data traffic.

With the exception of North America’s fixed access networks, where Netflix is dominant, YouTube is the largest single source of real-time entertainment traffic.

Still, the majority of mobile data in North America is streaming audio and video. YouTube accounts for 23.4 percent of daily traffic, while Pandora Radio represents 6.4 percent.

In North America, Netflix now represents 2.1 percent of mobile data.