The worlds’ airwaves look set to become a crowded place if predictions of a pending quadrupling of mobile data traffic prove accurate.
The prediction comes as part of an investigation by ABI Research into the growing use of cellphone networks for data – as opposed to the voice traffic the technology was originally developed to carry. With more and more consumers expecting top-speed broadband on the go, the worlds’ cell networks are beginning to creak at the seams – and it doesn’t look like it’ll get any better in the short term.
Rather, ABI Research’s Jeff Orr believes that the ever-increasing use of “versatile, aftermarket modem products” – including USB mobile broadband modems and 3G routers for home and business use – will result in the amount of data shipped across cell networks quadrupling from 2,000 petabytes currently to 8,000 petabytes by 2014.
Putting those figures into perspective, 8,000 petabytes is the equivalent of transferring approximately 871,490 DVDs – and remember, this is across the cell network.
Orr states that his company’s research “continues to demonstrate devices such as modems and routers are driving the majority of mobile data traffic, [and] not smartphones, nor computers with embedded radios.”
Interestingly, the biggest contributor to this massive growth in traffic isn’t peer-to-peer network – the technology most blamed for the increase in traffic on traditional broadband networks – but rather plain web browsing, by what ABI Research calls “a wide margin.” This use is bolstered by video and audio streaming from sites such as Hulu, YouTube, and Pandora.
Peer-to-peer networking – and voice-over-IP, which often has a peer-to-peer component for the routing of voice traffic – is described as contributing “relatively little to the overall usage mix due to operator service restrictions and/or monthly data usage caps.”
Orr also predicts a shift in where the data is coming from: while Western Europe consumes the highest quantity of mobile data bandwidth at the moment, Orr claims that by 2014 “the Asia-Pacific region [will] overtake Western Europe as the largest source of demand for this traffic.”
Although many mobile network companies are investing in LTE – Long Term Evolution – technologies which will hopefully increase speeds while providing the capacity required to support growth of the levels predicted by ABI Research, it’s likely to be a few years yet before the technology has reached the level where it is ready for mass adoption.
In the meantime, users are likely to be putting up with an increase in latency and a decrease in performance as more and more people attempt to transfer more and more data over the cellphone networks.
