iGR's latest research forecast a 16 times growth in global mobile data traffic from 433,000 terabytes per month in 2011 to nearly 7 million terabytes per month in 2016. This forecast is for mobile data networks, including 3G and LTE, but does not includes Wi-Fi traffic offloaded from the macro network.
iGR's mobile data traffic model estimates the amount of bandwidth consumed by a given activity -- e.g., checking email, listening to streaming music or watching streaming video, checking social sites, etc. iGR has estimated the traffic generated on a per application/use basis along with a forecast for how many times in a given time period an end user engages in the given activity. iGR prepares a data traffic model for each region of the world -- North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Japan and Middle East & Africa. Inputs for the traffic model are taken from iGR's extensive end user behavior data.
"To the casual observer, it seems obvious that mobile data traffic is increasing simply due to the proliferation of smartphones and tablets," said Iain Gillott, president and founder of iGR, a market research consultancy focused on the wireless and mobile industry. "But the reality is that far more bandwidth is used on mobile data networks than many people believe. And we expect the situation to get worse -- the growth for mobile data traffic in all regions of the world is strong, resulting in an astronomical growth in global mobile data traffic."
To create their traffic forecast, iGR built usage profiles based on primary and secondary consumer and enterprise research over the past several years. They divided connections into four different categories: light, medium, heavy and extreme. A connection corresponds to a device and connections can exceed subscribers. For example, a mobile worker in North America might have three devices -- a smartphone, laptop and a tablet. A consumer might have two (a smartphone and a tablet) or a mix of non-smartphone, smartphone, tablet, laptop and/or mobile hotspot.
Generally speaking, the larger the device, the more bandwidth is consumed on it. That is, a laptop connection will likely generate far more traffic than a smartphone. This is primarily because a laptop is far more conducive to heavy usage than a smartphone and is typically used in a place where the user is stationary and disposed toward consuming/generating a great deal of data traffic. That said, the advent of streaming video and audio applications (Pandora, Netflix, HBO Go, Amazon Cloud Player, etc.), not to mention YouTube, makes consuming hundreds of megabytes on a smartphone quite easy. The key difference, of course, is that the laptop user could be multitasking among several different high-traffic applications whereas the smartphone user is typically only engaged in one, maybe two.
It should also be noted that seemingly minor changes in per day, week or month mobile data consumption can greatly impact average bandwidth consumption. For example, starting to watch a single streamed episode of a TV show per week on a smartphone could easily equate to an additional 350-500 MB of usage per month.
These bandwidth numbers and usage profiles were used as the baseline for the global mobile data traffic model and forecast.
