Teenagers have increased mobile first TV viewing at home by 85% in 4 years, and almost halved their time spent watching traditional TV. This has led to a 127% increase in teen’s usage of cellular data in the past 15 months, according to Ericsson’s 2016 Mobility Report.
In October last year, the average monthly cellular data usage was 480MB and for WiFi this was 3,090MB – this is an increase of 80% for cellular data from July 2014, and 164% for WiFi. But data hungry 16 to 19 year olds are still left wanting more, as 63% of the 20,000 teens surveyed in the US, Japan and South Korea say they would like to pay for improved data speed and coverage – the highest of any age group.
Ericsson also reports that there will be 13 times more mobile data traffic in Central Europe, the Middle East and Africa by 2021 – and by this time video will account for 70% of the world’s mobile data traffic, at a CAGR of 55%.
YouTube still dominates video traffic on smartphones, accounting for between 50% and 70% of total video traffic in the majority of mobile networks. In markets where Netflix has launched, its share of video traffic can reach 10% to 20% of total mobile video traffic. Of course, for both YouTube and Netflix this is only cellular delivered data that’s being measured, not WiFi to a phone. YouTube doesn’t account for anything close to 50% of traffic on the entire internet.
Social networking is expected to grow by 41% each year up to 2021, whereby its relative share of traffic will fall from 15% to 10% in six years’ time – as Ericsson’s methodology counts embedded video in social media web pages as video traffic, not social networking traffic. So in the eyes of Ericsson, any hopes of video success for the likes of Facebook and Twitter won’t even account for anything.
In Q1 this year, mobile subscriptions reached around 7.4 billion worldwide, according to Ericsson, which is coincidentally around the same number as there are people on the planet. Of course not every person on Earth has a mobile subscription, many of these are inactive, and many in developed markets have multiple subscriptions or optimization of subscriptions for different types of calls. Further figures from the previous quarter show mobile broadband hit 3.7 billion subscriptions, and there are now 3.4 billion smartphone subscriptions.
Ericsson notes that although there are some 7.4 billion subscriptions, there are actually around 5 billion subscribers – it accounts for subscriptions on smartphones, mobile PCs, tablets, mobile routers, as well as mobile broadband subscriptions, and mobile subscriptions for GSM/EDGE-only, WCDMA/HSPA, LTE, and 5G. Of these, LTE subscriptions are expected to grow the most from 1.1 billion today to 4.3 billion by 2021, according to Ericsson’s forecast, and LTE will be the dominant mobile access technology by 2019.
Smartphone subscription growth worldwide will be largely driven by huge growth in emerging markets in the Middle East and Africa where smartphone subscriptions are forecast to increase by over 200% between 2015 and 2021. Globally, there will be 3 billion smartphone subscription additions in this period, bringing the total to 6.3 billion – over half of these will be in the Asia Pacific region with 1.7 billion additions expected there.