Review of Current LTE Pricing, by Openet

  

Openet published a white paper that "examines some of the pricing and packaging used by operators in launching LTE services".

The operators covered are: TeliaSonera [here], Netcom Norway, Telia Denmark, Sonera Finland, EMT Estonia, Omnitel Lithuania, MetroPCS [here], A1 Austria, Verizon wireless [here], CSL, Vodafone Germany [here], NTT DoCoMo and Deutsche Telekom

The document "LTE Pricing and Packaging - Current Operator LTE Pricing and Packaging Overview" is downloadable here.

".. The specific usage limits imposed by mobile operators vary dramatically, ranging from 20-30 GB/month in many European markets, to 10GB/month or less in the US and 5GB/month in other markets like Japan. Once these caps are reached, operators are applying a mixture of throttling and overage charges, with no uniformity .. As of May 2011, it can be seen that LTE is focused on meeting the needs of a small subset of users. Operators are starting to innovate with their data plans and during the writing of this report several operators changed their pricing plans in a drive to attract new LTE subscribers"

Sandvine: "individual subscribers in Europe consume twice the amount of data as North Americans"

 

Sandvine released a new edition of their Global Internet Phenomena Report, with spring 2011 data ".. from North America, Latin America and Europe, with specific spotlights on events such as Netflix adoption and March Madness® On Demand.  Overall insights since the last report in the fall of 2010, reveal a growing appetite for on-demand applications that will continue to drive data consumption and network quality requirements"

See the press release "Sandvine’s Spring 2011 Global Internet Phenomena Report Reveals New Internet Trends" - here and download the report here.

Main conclusions relate to entertainment traffic and particularly:

• Real-Time Entertainment traffic* is continuing its journey to network dominance, particularly in North America, where it represents 49.2% of peak period fixed access traffic. If this rate of growth is sustained, Real-Time Entertainment will make up 55-60% of traffic by the end of the year. See also "TDG: "OTT video to eclipse live broadcast TV around 2020" - here.
   
• Netflix is the undisputed bandwidth leader on North America’s fixed access networks. See also "Does Netflix Replace P2P File Sharing?" - here.
   
• The continued growth of Real-Time Entertainment enables a seemingly contradictory conclusion: P2P Filesharing is here to stay, at least for the immediate future, as evidenced by the marginal drop in share from 19.2% of peak period traffic in Fall 2010 to 18.8% in Spring 2011
   
• In Europe, Real-Time Entertainment continues a steady climb, rising to 33.2% of peak aggregate traffic, up from 31.9% last fall. BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing protocol, is the largest single component of both upstream (59.7%) and downstream (21.6%) Internet traffic during peak periods.
   
• In the UK, BBC’s iPlayer is 6.6% of peak downstream traffic, reflecting the demand for localized content in many markets.
   
• Overall, individual subscribers in Europe consume twice the amount of data as North Americans (monthly mean of 39.6 GB vs. 23 GB, see charts below)

*Real-Time Entertainment protocols and applications are: "Streamed or buffered audio and video (RTSP, RTP, RTMP, Flash), peercasting (PPStream, Octoshape), placeshifting (Slingbox, home media servers), specific streaming sites and services (Netflix, NCAA, Hulu, YouTube, Google Video, Spotify, BBC iPlayer)"