Entertainment Video Drives 62% of Data Consumption on North American Android Devices

In North America, on Android smartphones, entertainment video represents about 62 percent of total data consumption.

The typical North American household now has over seven active devices in use each day, with six percent of households having more than 15 active devices, according to Sandvine’s Global Internet Phenomena Spotlight: Inside the Connected Home report.

As you might guess, that also means traffic is fragmenting. PCs now account for less than 25 percent of total traffic on fixed access networks.

Conversely, mobile devices (tablets and smartphones) now account for almost 30 percent of North American fixed access traffic.

Looking at applications, the big change is video streaming, which now accounts for 65 percent of bandwidth consumption, across all devices.

Game downloads drive about 25 percent of  bandwidth consumption.

30% Smartphone Adoption in Philippines

Mobile data will drive mobile revenue in the Philippines: just about 30 percent of people already use a smartphone, even if most people use feature phones. 


source: Pawn Hero

What is a Good Wave Worth?

What is a wave worth? By one estimate, waves ridden by surfers represent $51 billion in economic activity.

source: Save the Waves

That is the result of a study of 5,000 locations by Oxford University economists Thomas McGregor and Samuel Wills, who studied night-time light emissions as a proxy for economic activity.

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Another study of Australian activity over a two-month period of about $20 million for local economies.

The notion of applying market forces to conservation or preservation of natural assets sometimes is criticized as applying a market test to non-material values. Surfers who think about it might agree that highlighting the value of waves can contribute to preservation, conservation, cleanliness and other non-material values.

$45 per day is an estimate of the economic value of surfable waves found near the coastal community of Huanchaco, Peru, the non-profit Save the Waves organization has estimated.

In Pichilemu, Chile, for example, the average surf tourist spends $168 per day.  In Uluwatu in Bali, Indonesia, the typical surf tourist spends $150 per day.

Google Researchers Apply Artificial Intelligence to Image Compression

Google has applied artificial intelligence to the problem of optimizing energy usage in its data centers, and researchers now say they have developed a way to use AI for compressing  images more efficiently than using JPEG.

Such practical applications for artificial intelligence will be needed to push machine learning into the mainstream of business processes.

Global Enterprise Spending Flat Through 2020, Garner Predicts

source: Gartner

With several caveats--that global trends are not necessarily reflected in every local market; that some spending is disguised (open source investments, for example); that market share shifts are happening; and that some sectors are growing while others decline--Gartner says global telecom spending by enterprises is flat in 2016, and likely will stay that way through 2020.

The other caveat is that major global upticks and downturns tend to affect enterprise capital investment as well. So any synchronized global downturn will have more negative impact than current projections incorporate.

Also, currency fluctuations also affect the reported level of spending. On a constant currency basis, information technology spending would be up about 1.5 percent.

At the same time, productivity improvements mean enterprises can spend less, while gaining greater advantage from any fixed amount of spending.

 

Separately, Ovum says second quarter 2016 earnings by public service providers show that service provider revenues overall grew about one percent in the second quarter, year over year.

That, Ovum says, is the first his year-over-year growth since the third quarter of 2014. Those figures include both consumer and business segments, and likely reflect revenue gains in consumer segments of the business.

Much small business spending on cloud services or mobility often gets disguised as consumer spending on such services, as well.

U.K. Business Telecom Spending Falls, but SME Grows

If 2015 enterprise and business spending on telecommunications services has relevance for the U.S. market, business segment revenue likely is down (fixed and mobile), but small business buying of voice and Internet access lines is up.

Leased line and web hosting revenue likely climbed fractionally.

Web hosting grew 1.3 percent, while Ethernet or leased-line services grew 1.5 percent.

IP-VPN services revenue fell slightly (0.8 percent), while frame or cell (ATM) services revenue plummeted 53.5 percent.

Total U.K. business revenue fell by £0.2 billion (2.4 percent) to £9.1 billion in 2015. This was driven by a £0.2 billion (7.6 percent) decrease in fixed voice revenues and a £0.2 billion (5.4 percent) fall in mobile revenues, partly offset by a £0.1 billion (14 percent) increase in non-corporate internet services.

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The decline in business monthly retail revenue per fixed line was due to call volume and price declines.

The proportion of business calls that originated on mobile networks was 56 percent in 2015, representing a 1.2 percentage point increase on 2014.

source: Ofcom

But total business call volumes fell by 2.2 billion minutes (4.9 percent) in 2015, driven by a fall of 1.5 billion (7.5 percent) fixed business minutes and 0.7 billion (2.9 percent) mobile business minutes, excluding use of IP telephony services.

At the end of 2015 there were 7.6 million business fixed lines and ISDN channels, a year over year fall of 0.3 million (4.3 percent), and 2.0 million (21 percent) fewer than there had been at the end of 2010.

The number of small and mid-sized business broadband lines increased by 0.1 million (5.2 percent) in 2015. Between 2010 and 2015 SME broadband lines increased by 0.6 million (a five-year CAGR of 5.4 percent).

At the end of 2015 there were 9.5 million business mobile connections (excluding the 6.7 million M2M connections), equivalent to 13 percent of all such connections.

Some 77 percent of businesses’ dedicated data subscriptions were M2M connections.

U.K. Households Increase Data Consumption 41%, Year over Year

In 2015, the average U.K. household buying fixed network Internet access consumed 82 GB of data each month, a 41 percent increase compared to the 58 GB per month recorded in June 2014.

Higher consumption of over the top entertainment video was a driver of the change, as well as faster speeds. As always, faster speeds mean more data can be consumed in any given unit of time. Also, faster speeds mean each household user can consume more data in any given unit of time.

source: Ofcom

That noted, well over half of all U.K. household telecom spending (54 percent) is for mobile services. Some 18 percent of telecom spending is for fixed Internet access. About 28 percent of spending is for fixed network voice (inflated, to a certain extent, because digital subscriber line service also requires purchase of voice service).

U.K. telecom revenue grew in 2015, up £0.2bn (0.5 percent) to £37.5 billion, propelled by  (Figure a £0.5 billion (4.2 percent) increase in retail fixed revenue, itself driven by a 12.6 percent rise in fixed internet revenues. Some 0.9 million more Internet access connections were added in 2015, representing growth of 3.9 percent.

Mobile revenue actually fell 0.4 percent, while wholesale revenue fell 4.2 percent.

Enterprise data revenue also fell by one percent.

In the consumer segment, average revenue per account drove a 3.2 percent increase in telecom spending.

U.K. telecom services spending spending now accounts for 3.5 percent of total spending (not total household income).

Fixed network voice lines decreased 0.3 million, or one percent. Mobile subscriptions grew 1.8 percent (including machine-to-machine accounts).

Fixed network voice call minutes fell by seven billion minutes (9.2 percent) to 74 billion minutes in 2015 and mobile voice call minutes increased by five billion minutes (two percent) to 143 billion minutes.

The total number of outgoing SMS and MMS messages continued to fall in 2015, down by eight billion messages (7.6 percent) to 101 billion messages, although this was a smaller fall than in either 2013 or 2014, in large part because people are shifting to over the top messaging alternatives.

source: Ofcom