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Mobile Data Consumption Rate Set for Tenfold Increase by 2016

By Jeffrey Hill | May 31, 2012

[Satellite TODAY Insider 05-31-12] The worldwide mobile data market will see a tenfold increase in consumption by 2016, with mobile phone users consuming six-and-a-half times as much video, eight times as much music and nearly ten times as much gaming than they did in 2011, according to an Informa Telecoms and Media report published May 30.

   While the mobile data market would normally welcome such a dramatic consumption growth rate, Informa notes that the increase in data traffic will far outstrip revenue growth. “Global mobile data traffic is forecast to grow tenfold from 3.89 trillion megabytes in 2011 to 39.75 trillion megabytes in 2016,” the firm wrote in the report. “However, global mobile data revenues are only forecast to double in the same period from $325.8 billion in 2011 to $627.5 billion in 2016.”
   In a statement responding to the Informa report, Napatech CEO Henrik Brill Jensen said the consumption growth would drive renewed interest in improving insight into telecom network performance and optimization.
   “Tenfold data consumption with only double revenues means that carriers need to manage their networks very carefully,” said Jensen. “Understanding what services are being used, when and where they are being used and how this impacts your network design is critical to ensuring that mobile networks can accommodate the forecast growth in a cost-effective manner. Network performance monitoring, real-time protocol analysis and network optimization solutions, such as policy enforcement, are all important tools in providing this insight and having the ability to act upon this information.”
   Napatech develops adapters for network analysis based on standard off-the-shelf server hardware. Jensen added that, as a vendor to several of the largest system manufacturers in the world, Napatech is seeing the interest in increasing data processing capacity and throughput firsthand.
   “We have many customers at 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps speeds with the transition to 40 Gbps now beginning”, stated Jensen. “By offering a common feature set across all these speed grades through a single API, we allow our OEM vendor customers to easily upgrade from one speed grade to the next as data speeds increase.”