Data Traffic Increases

Ericsson's Mobility Report June 2013

Ericsson released the latest version of its quarterly Mobility Report earlier this month, showing that mobile data traffic is growing fast, and video is the reason for the surge.

Ericsson estimates that data traffic will grow by 12 times by 2018. Chief reasons for the increase are the amount of online video available and improved network speeds thanks to HSPA and LTE development.

Video traffic alone is growing by 60 percent each year, Ericsson notes. As network speeds increase, mobile users are rushing to take advantage of them. Video is the largest type of data traffic. Some networks average 2.6GB of video data per subscription per month. This agrees with the latest Cisco VNI.

Video might be the biggest data hog, but social networking is the biggest time hog. Mobile customers spend more time on social networks than they do streaming videos. On some networks, subscribers spend up to 85 minutes per day on social networks. 


Ericsson's report also looks at the growth of smartphones, finding that half of mobile phone sales in the first quarter of 2013 were for smartphones. That compares to 40 percent of phone sales for 2012. Global mobile phone subscriptions grew by 8 percent in the first quarter of 2013.



Ericsson Qtr report and archives can be located here - Ericsson mobility report