Mobile Traffic, Connections, and Network Speeds—Oh My!
The latest Mobile Operator Industry report contains some interesting stats highlighting the explosive growth of the mobile Web.
The GSMA, which is a mobile operator industry group, released a beefy report this week on the state of the mobile economy that is nicely designed and, more importantly, chock-full of interesting tidbits.
Among the more salient stats:
Nearly half the world now uses cellphones–that’s 3.2 billion people–and the group expects another 700 million will be added over the coming years to bring this number past 4 billion in 2018. Not surprisingly, huge growth areas are expected to be in the Asia Pacific region, Africa, and Latin America.
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There are many more mobile connections than cellphone users (lots of folks use more than one SIM): nearly seven billion in 2012. This is predicted to climb to nearly 10 billion in 2017.
While most mobile connections are currently over 2G networks (3G makes up a smaller piece of the pie and 4G just a sliver), in 2017, 2G networks will make up less than half while 3G and 4G rise to a combined 53 percent of the market. The group forecasts that, in 2017, one out of every five mobile broadband subscriptions will be for an LTE or other 4G high-speed network, up from one in 25 last year.
Mobile traffic in 2012 exceeded every other year combined, totaling 0.9 exabytes per month (each exabyte is equal to a billion gigabytes). In 2017, this is expected to climb to 11.2 exabytes per month.
Last year, revenue spent on the global “mobile ecosystem” totaled nearly $1.6 trillion–a figure expected to climb to nearly $2 trillion in 2017.
