Video traffic to grow at 60 p.c.: Ericsson

BANGALORE, INDIA: Mobile-data traffic will continue to grow significantly in the coming years, a trend driven mainly by video. The new edition of the Ericsson Mobility Report reveals that overall data traffic is expected to grow 12-fold by the end of 2018.

Video makes up the largest segment of data traffic in networks, and it is expected to grow around 60 per cent annually up until the end of 2018. Video consumption is on average 2.6GB per subscription per month in some networks.

While video is popular, users do not necessarily tend to spend the most time on data-heavy applications. Consumers spend more time on social networking: an average of up to 85 minutes per day in some networks.

Increasing usage is driven by continual growth in the amount of content available as well as the improved network speeds that come with HSPA and LTE development. Mobile subscriptions in India saw a net addition of 10 million in Q1 2013.

Douglas Gilstrap, senior vice president and head, Strategy, Ericsson, says: "LTE services will be available to about 60 per cent of the world's population in 2018. We expect LTE subscriptions to exceed 1 billion in 2017, driven by more capable devices and demand for data-intensive services such as video. Owing to the build out of WCDMA/HSPA, network speeds have improved, and so has the user experience."

Smartphones accounted for around half of all mobile-phone sales in Q1 2013, compared with roughly 40 per cent for the whole of 2012. The number of total mobile subscriptions grew by eight per cent globally year-on-year by Q1 2013. Of those, WCDMA/HSPA added around 60 million subscriptions, GSM/EDGE-only subscriptions grew by roughly 30 million, and LTE added around 20 million new subscriptions. Mobile-broadband subscriptions grew even faster over this period (at a rate of 45 per cent year-on-year), reaching around 1.7 billion.