Mobile Data Traffic to Grow Ten Times by 2016

In yet another sign that mobile users are slurping up more and more data, a new report from Ericsson says that traffic on mobile data networks will grow ten-fold between now and 2016.

Driven mostly by online video consumption, mobile broadband subscriptions are likely to skyrocket to almost 5 billion in another five years from 900 million this year. And much of that growth will come from a very small number of people.

By 2016, more than 30 percent of the planet’s population will live in metropolitan and urban areas with around 1,000 people per square kilometer. Though such areas will account for less than 1 percent of the world’s total land area, they’ll consume around 60 percent of all mobile traffic, says Ericsson (News - Alert).

Currently, around 82 percent of the world has access to mobile services, with the number of subscriptions now totaling around 5.8 billion, close to the entire population of the earth. However, mobile subscribers only number around 3.9 billion since many people have more than one subscription.

Smartphones also continue to surge in popularity across a variety of regions. Around 30 percent of all mobile phones sold over the third quarter were smartphones, up from 20 percent for all of 2010. But only around 10 percent of all mobile subscriptions use smartphones, meaning there’s room for considerably higher growth, says Ericsson.

Around 75 percent of mobile subscriptions around the world use GSM, while 14 percent using WCDMA/HSPA. Providers are currently trying to ramp up their 4G LTE (News - Alert) networks, but LTE probably will still be used by a small, although growing, number of subscribers in another five years.

Overall, an increase in mobile broadband, new smartphones, and higher app consumption will all drive the push for more data. Smartphones alone will account for a huge part of that – Ericsson believes that traffic used by smartphones will increase 12-fold between now and 2016, just about equaling all the traffic used by personal computers.

What does this all mean for IT professionals?

It means further demand for and dependence on mobile services among your user population. As we’ve increasingly seen, the days when IT simply provided and supported end users with company computers are long gone. Users today expect to be mobile and expect to be able to use the same services outside the workplace that they use inside. As as evidenced by Ericsson’s findings, this overall trend will continue to grow over the next few years, requiring IT to ensure that it has the necessary infrastructure and resources to support the rising number of mobile users.