Is the Rapid Growth in Mobile Data Traffic Sustainable?

Is the Rapid Growth in Mobile Data Traffic Sustainable?

by davepring on May 14, 2009 - 09:42.
We already knew mobile broadband is riding the crest of wave. But the latest figures from Orange U.K. suggest that wave could soon become one of the giant breakers off the coast of Hawaii.


Orange says the monthly data traffic on its UK network has more than doubled to over 386,000 gigabytes in the past six months. Mobile data usage via dongles (the modems that plug into USB slots of laptops) has soared by a whopping 4,125% in 12 months, according to the latest Orange’s Digital Media Index.
But it isn’t all about dongles. The index, which covers the period from December to February, shows handset users are spending more time on social networking sites and downloading more videos, music and games. Encouragingly for Orange, traffic to its own portal has risen 63% to 176 million page impressions per month compared with the July to September period.
Orange’s figures suggest its 3.8 million mobile broadband customers are averaging about 100 megabytes a month each in data usage.
While Orange UK may be an extreme case, other operators’ first quarter reports indicate rapid growth in mobile data usage is also taking place in the many markets where HSPA-based services are now widely-available. While this is great news for the mobile industry, as ever, the challenge for operators is to ensure they can earn sufficient revenues from this additional traffic to build-out the capacity that will be required to accommodate ongoing exponential growth.
Although Orange UK’s mobile broadband customers rose 82% year-on-year in the year to the end of March, its revenues from mobile data services were up just 3.3% in the first quarter of 2009 compared with the same quarter of 2008. Is this kind of growth sustainable?

Source : http://www.mobileinnovation.org/node/13792