Friday, June 26, 2015

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

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

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