Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Sandvine Traffic Report: Mobile Internet is a Good Business

 
Sandvine's Mobile Internet Phenomena study I mentioned two days ago (here) is out today. Like other DPI players Sandvine finds the mobile internet market as very lucrative for all the obvious reasons (use of smartphones and laptops, 4G speeds etc). Sandvine's press release - here, and you may download the report after filling a short form.

The report is very detailed,however focusing on North,Latin America and Europe. Asia (a major, early adapter market) is missing. We have seen most of the trends already in other reports, so I chose to show one finding (or theory) - the impact of laptops on mobile data usage.

Most people attribute the growth of mobile data to the use of smartphones (“iPhone”) - however it is clear that fully-functioned laptops are much more significant.

Nowadays, when mobile is an alternative access method to DSL and Cable (i.e. to be use at home) - we will see how significant laptops (and tablets) are.

According to Sandvine (PP 31):

" The devices that subscribers use to connect to the network exert a huge influence on the levels and  make-up of traffic. A single laptop can easily account for 100 times the byte usage of an average smartphone, and this reality has major implications for service providers. Using this conservative estimate, and assuming that an active subscriber is either using a laptop or a smartphone (and not both), it is possible to illustrate the significant impact of laptops on wireless networks ... Even with only a 5 percent penetration of aircard-enabled laptops, network traffic increases by almost 50 percent, and laptops make up one-third of that traffic."


 
 

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