Fixed Mobile Convergence

Smartphone users are generating 66 percent of total mobile cellular traffic worldwide, despite the fact that only 13 percent of mobile subscribers use smartphones, according to Informa (News - Alert) Telecoms & Media. As is the case with fixed broadband consumption, a relatively small number of users produce most of the network load. In the mobile arena, 13 percent of users consume 66 percent of the bandwidth.

That should come as no surprise, since most data traffic is Internet or video related: voice and text are bandwidth efficient. There is another analogy to fixed-line broadband you also should expect: as a growing number of smartphone users spend more time on the Internet, traffic will increase by 700 percent over the next five years.

Informa Telecoms & Media estimates that average traffic per smartphone currently averages 85 MBytes per month. The iPhone (News - Alert) is the highest-traffic-generating device followed by Android devices. It will retain this lead, Informa Telecoms & Media believes, because Android devices will be spread across high-, mid- and low-user segments.

"The traffic disparity between smartphone and non-smartphone is most pronounced in North America where 86 percent of mobile data traffic is currently generated by smartphone users, notably those using an iPhone or high-end Android (News - Alert) devices," said Malik Kamal-Saadi, principal analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media. By 2015, those users will be consuming 776 Mbytes a month. 

Western Europe will see average smartphone user consumption of 736 MBytes month in 2015, up from under 44 MBytes a month in 2009.

The highest smartphone average usage will continue to come from South Korea and Japan with respective values of 271 MBytes a month and 199 MBbytes a month expected in 2010, which is two to three times higher than the global average.

Android users currently consume about 148 MBytes a month and likely will exceed 757 MBytes a month by 2015.