Statosaurus - it’s the Ericsson Traffic and Market report
Loads of interesting stats on the global mobile industry in the latest Ericsson Traffic and Market report. The data is pretty comprehensive and covers all aspects of the mobile industry from subscribers, traffic, networks, LTE, revenues, coverage, user satisfaction and everything in between.
I’ve picked out a few tasty bits but for anyone needing proper quantifiable data from a leading source then it really is worth a look. Here’s a taster:
Mobile subscriptions penetration
Subscriptions are funny numbers as they’re often greater than 100% which in theory makes no sense - how can a country have more mobile subscribers than people? Well the answer is mainly due due to people having more than one subscription for different reasons - different SIM’s for cost reasons, coverage reasons or they own multiple devices.
From the report: “Global mobile penetration reached 87 percent in Q1 2012 and mobile subscriptions now total around 6.2 billion. However, the actual number of subscribers is around 4.2 billion, since many have several subscriptions”.
Mobile subscriptions by region
This is an interesting one if like me you’re working for a software company selling to mobile operators. We tend to get excited by developed markets in North America and Europe where smartphone penetration is high, networks are decent quality (allegedly!) and consumers are consuming new services. Well that’s all well and good but these markets are in the minority globally. The large markets are Asia Pacific (APAC), Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa (CEMA) (although I do think that’s lumping a lot of different regions together) and Latin America (LATAM).
Global mobile traffic - voice and data
No surprises here - mobile PCs dominate traffic but smartphone traffic is growing fast. Mobile data rises rapidly and in later years it is driven by mobile devices (smartphones) more than tables or mobile PC’s. The obvious impact here is just the sheer scale of growth - an eightfold increase from 2012 to 2017 is pretty massive by any expectations.
Data usage by mobile OS
This chart shows three things - the maximum, minimum and average data usage by OS. The average is represented by the line. iOS and Android have both the highest average usage at between 360 and 380 MB per user, per month with Windows smartphones, Blackberry and featurephones considerably lower.
The wider variation in iOS and Android is due to the variety of data tariffs offered to consumers, some of which include high levels of data - like the average usage of nearly 1.4 GB per user, per month reported by one network. Ouch.
Smartphone forecast
And what self respecting mobile person can finish a post without talking about smartphone penetration. Well to add to the pantheon of data on this subject here’s a bit more that show’s smartphone penetration zooming skywards.
That said it’s still an extraordinary analysis - smartphone subscriptions are expected to reach around 3 billion in 2017!!!
