Mobile Video Will Drive Global Consumer Data Demand

There is a very simple reason why lots more mobile bandwidth is going to be needed in coming years. The number of discrete users and devices will grow; while the types of apps people use is changing.

Notably, consumption of video on mobile phones is exploding, mobile devices are the primary Internet access device globally, and therefore mobile video consumption will drive aggregate mobile bandwidth demand.

According to Ooyala, mobile video consumption grew 367 percent between the first quarter of 2013 and the first quarter of 2015.

In fact, mobile devices represented fully 42 percent of all video viewing in the first quarter of 2015.

Bandwidth intensity is the issue. Video, for example, simply requires an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude bandwidth than most other apps. A one hour IP-based voice call might consume 28.8 Mbytes. An hour of mobile video consumption might consume 120 Mbytes. An hour of high definition TV consumption might consume 2.5 Gbytes.

Sample Service and Application Bandwidth Comparisons
Segment	Application or Service Name	KB
Consumer mobile	SMS	0.13
Consumer mobile	MMS with video	100
Business	IP telephony (1-hour call)	28,800
Residential	Social networking (1 hour)	90,000
Residential	Online music streaming (1 hour)	72,000
Consumer mobile	Video and TV (1 hour)	120,000
Residential	Online video streaming (1 hour)	247,500
Business	Web conferencing with webcam (1 hour)	310,500
Residential	HD TV programming (1 hour, MPEG 4)	2,475,000
Business	Room-based videoconferencing (1 hour, multicodec telepresence)	5,850,000

source: Cisco

Summary of Per-Device Usage Growth, MB per Month
Device Type	2014	2019
Non-smartphone	22 MB/month	105 MB/month
M2M Module	70 MB/month	366 MB/month
Wearable Device	141 MB/month	479 MB/month
Smartphone	819 MB/month	3,981 MB/month
4G Smartphone	2,000 MB/month	5,458 MB/month
Tablet	2,076 MB/month	10,767 MB/month
4G Tablet	2,913 MB/month	12,314 MB/month
Laptop	2,641 MB/month	5,589 MB/month

source: Cisco