“You had to go back to the office to edit your e-mail but now we are carrying large screened, powerful devices that allow us to do pretty much everything a desktop machine could, on a mobile device. People are actually doing that now.”
Cloud explosion
Tierney said the second and most significant driver of data use has been the explosion of cloud-based technologies and applications. As more and more businesses move their data to the cloud and start accessing content there, naturally their data traffic skyrockets.
Large companies have their own internal systems hosted in the cloud, as well as public facing technologies operating from the cloud while smaller companies are using things like Office 365 and Google Apps for business, and that’s driving their demand for data, Barry Tierney, Vodafone
“For us, that’s been a huge driver. Large companies have their own internal systems hosted in the cloud, as well as public facing technologies operating from the cloud while smaller companies are using things like Office 365 and Google Apps for business, and that’s driving their demand for data,” he said.
The third driver for Vodafone has been video conferencing – something that has been around for a long time but really needed improved data speeds to make it reliable and compelling.
“This has taken a major leap forward in recent years and it’s a lot more convincing as a business tool than it used to be. A lot of our customers are starting to use Google Hangouts, Lync or some other app to do this from their mobile phone or tablet, and the benefits are huge,” he said.
LTE
Meanwhile, LTE is on track to reach the milestone of half a billion subscriptions in 2015 around the world, according to a recent report by Ovum Consulting, commissioned by Mobidia. Launched in Scandinavia in December 2009, it has been only five years since its first major commercial launches in the US and Japan in December 2010.
In comparison, the two major 3G technologies (WCDMA and CDMA) together took seven years to reach the same milestone while 3G WCDMA on its own took nine years and 2G took even longer. According to Ovum and Mobidia, that means LTE has earned the distinction of being the fastest-growing technology by subscriptions in the history of the mobile industry.
“People will do more with a faster and better connection,” said Chris Hill, senior vice president of marketing with Mobidia. “We’ve been tracking this for a number of years now and we’re seeing a shift, an increase in data use that can be explained by new services and applications but also by the fact that people are willing to do more on a cellular connection if they have a good connection such as those offered by LTE networks.”
“There are some apps that people will generally hold off using until they have a Wi-Fi connection — things like video or file sharing, upgrading apps etc. They do this for two reasons — economics and user experience. But there are also apps that people will use regardless of what connection they have — e-mail, Facebook, etc and then there are apps in the middle that they’ll use if they are easy to use. That’s where a lot of growth is happening.”
Not fast enough
Hill believes that LTE is not fast enough to accommodate the kind of growth in the market that will become commonplace in coming years and as the networks become more crowded, then new technologies will become more important. However, usage patterns and the split between time spent on mobile networks and time spend using fixed line-powered Wi-Fi are likely to stay the same.
“There are only so many hours in the day, and the average person spends X amount of time at work and Y amount of time at home and Z amount of time commuting. The 80:20 rule of 80% of time on Wi-Fi and 20% on mobile is a natural ratio, based on the number of hours in the day,” said Hill.
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