Juniper Research said that cellular data will reach 129,000 Petabytes in 2018 equivalent to approximately 14 billion hours of 4K video streaming and that increased viewing of UltraHD will cause this to ‘almost triple’ to 318,000 Petabytes by 2021, with video rising from 60% of usage in 2017 to 80% by 2021.
Mobile Data Traffic Highlights: 2017-2021
- Global average smartphone cellular data usage will reach 5GB per month by 2021, up from 2GB in 2017.
- Global average tablet cellular data usage to exceed 3.3GB per month by 2021, up from 1.5GB in 2017.
- Video to account for 60% of global mobile data traffic in 2017, before approaching 80% by 2021.
- Traffic generated by cellular connected M2M systems will approach 6,000PB by 2021, dominated by the automotive sector.
- Cellular-connected fixed devices including notebooks and eReaders will reach 20% of total traffic to mobile networks in 2017.
- Data traffic generated by smartphone, tablets and featurephones will grow fourfold between 2017 and 2021 to reach 774,000PB, equivalent to 81 billion hours of 4K streaming.
The Demand for Wi-Fi Offload Continues
The use of Wi-Fi by operators for data offload has boosted the build-out of Wi-Fi hotspots in recent years. Juniper predicts that this will lead to over 60% of global mobile data traffic being offloaded via Wi-Fi networks in 2017.
However, the research warned that a high QoE (quality of experience) while offloading data users will be essential for future network monetisation strategies. Report author Nitin Bhas added: “Operators need to support a user-experience comparable to that of cellular. Whilst progress has been made in, for example, refining handoffs between cellular and Wi-Fi, there is still room for improvement by implementing better network management and planning tools”.
