TMCnews Featured Article

March 05, 2012

Mobile Data Bandwidth Usage Grows

By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor

Officials of Allot (News - Alert) Communications, which sells service optimization and revenue generation products for broadband service providers, say that mobile data bandwidth usage experienced 83 percent growth during H2 2011.

Other findings include the fact that you people really, really like your Facebook (News - Alert) messenger. But hey, glad somebody’s getting good economic news these days, even if it is Mark Zuckerberg again.

Even that robust growth is upstaged by video streaming, which grew 88 percent, and is the single biggest bandwidth hog, probably not to anyone’s surprise, “accounting for 42 percent of mobile bandwidth,” Allot officials say. YouTube (News - Alert) alone sucks up 24 percent of all bandwidth traffic.

And if it isn’t YouTube it’s NetFlix. TMC’s Beecher Tuttle noted last October that “The customers who stuck with Netflix through its controversial price increases must do nothing but stream movies. A recent analysis study found that Netflix currently accounts for a whopping 32.7 percent of peak downstream traffic within fixed networks in the U.S, representing a relative increase of 10 percent since the spring.”

And no doubt BitTorrent and HTTP get their shares too.

VoIP? According to the report it has “limited impact” on overall bandwidth usage. Oh it’s getting more popular, that and IM, in fact they’re the fastest growing application type -- 114 percent increase -- and the star performer there is Facebook messenger, as the report put it “rising from zero to 22 percent of total IM traffic in just four months,” but IM’s nowhere near the overall volume of streaming video. Nothing really is.

Some mobile VoIP companies are hitting the opportunities. Late last year officials of mobile VoIP provider REVE Systems announced that their flagship product, iTel Mobile Dialer Express, can now be downloaded from Apple’s (News

- Alert) iTunes store by end users who want to make VoIP calls from their Apple devices.

ITel Mobile Dialer Express is a mobile client used for making VoIP calls. Priced at an affordable $5.99 for the end users in the iTunes store, the application, once downloaded, can configure with the details of the user’s IP PBX (News - Alert) or their own service provider’s softswitch, even if their service provider does not give them mobile VoIP options, company officials explained.

Andrei Elefant, Allot's Vice President of Marketing and Product Management, advised operators that “intelligent, application-based data pricing is the way forward."

Edited by Stefania Viscusi

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