The rapid and widespread success of
mobile broadband services, said to have more than 100 million
subscribers worldwide using more than 300 live networks, is
sparking a data traffic boom that will revive the struggling mobile
base station market.
This is the key finding of In ‘Mobile Networks Forecasts: Future
Mobile Traffic, Base Stations & Revenues’ Informa , a new
strategic report and forecasts from Informa Telecoms &
Media.
According to the report, the mobile broadband boom is helping
mobile operators achieve one of their key strategic goals -
increasing mobile data revenues in a bid to offset declining
voice revenues. For example Vodafone, the world's largest mobile
operator by revenues, reported £2.2 billion in non-messaging data
revenues for the year ended March 31 2008, up 55% from £1.4 billion
in 2007, due to strong growth in
business email and PC connectivity devices along with strong
take-up of mobile broadband USB modems. Informa believes that the
operator signed up 2 million consumer customers to its flat-rate
mobile Internet plans in 2007.
However, teh report also says that data traffic is growing much
faster than data revenues, partly due to the launch of flat-rate
mobile broadband tariffs. Vodafone's data traffic increased by more
than tenfold in the year ended 31 March 2008 compared to 2007,
versus a 55% increase in data revenues. And the trend is widespread
- T-Mobile reported a 10-fold increase in WCDMA/HSPA traffic in
first-half 2007 compared to first-half 2006, and operators
reporting at least a four-fold increase in mobile data traffic in
2007 include AT&T and Telecom Italia Mobile.
Informa Telecoms & Media forecasts that global mobile data
revenues will increase 77% from 2007 to 2012, but global mobile
data traffic will grow far faster, increasing more than 1000% over
the same period. The traffic boom will be driven by a dramatic
increase in the use of advanced applications such as mobile
browsing and video - for example mobile video traffic will grow
more than thirty-fold by 2012, according to Mobile Networks
Forecasts.
The bulk of the traffic boom will naturally happen on advanced
networks such as HSPA, EV-DO, WiMAX and LTE, with LTE for example
seeing a 70-fold increase in global traffic from 2010 to 2012.
Informa Telecoms & Media forecasts that 2011 will also be a
watershed in that it will be the year when mobile data traffic
overtakes mobile voice traffic, which has always driven mobile
network design, rollout and operation.