Mobile Broadband Growth 2009

Lynnette Luna from FierceBroadbandWireless has an interesting post titled Two studies point to explosive mobile broadband growth. In the post she first refers to Informa Telecoms & Media's newest World Cellular Data Metrics report, quoting the following:

• Mobile broadband subscribers worldwide almost reached a quarter of a billion at the end of March with more than 225 million subscribers. The figure represented 93% year-on-year growth.
• The popularity of mobile broadband is at its highest in the Asia-Pacific region, which supports more than 90 million subscribers.
• Latin American subscribers represent 385% year-on-year growth and support more than 10 million subscribers as 3G operators offer emerging market subscribers a primary Internet connection.
• The spread of the iPhone continues to boost data usage for those operators that distribute the model with O2 reporting that 40% of its data traffic in UK comes from the smartphone market.

Lynnette also quotes Allot Communications' first Global Mobile Broadband Traffic Report (GMBT). This report tracked global IP application usage and growth, collected data from leading mobile operators worldwide with a combined user base of more than 150 million subscribers:

• Worldwide mobile data bandwidth usage has increased by about 30% during the second quarter of 2009.
• Asia leads the growth with 36%.
• Europe posted 28% growth.
• The Americas recorded 25% growth.

Allot also says the report shows how subscribers, particularly heavy data users, do not distinguish between their fixed and their mobile networks, and seem to expect the same service from the Internet, irrespective of their access method. Specifically:

• HTTP browsing is the most popular application globally and usage increased by 21%.
• HTTP streaming is the fastest growing application with a usage increase of 58%. This includes streaming sites such as YouTube and Hulu.
• HTTP downloads, which experienced 34% growth globally, are now almost as popular as P2P, and in EMEA have even overtaken P2P in popularity.
• P2P accounts for 42% of bandwidth utilization in the busiest cells on the network, but only 21% in the average cell.

You can get information on the Allot report here and get information on the Informa report here.