Canadian mobile traffic to rise nine-fold by end of 2017, Cisco says

Canadian mobile data traffic will rise by 57 per cent per year for the next four years and reach 1.8 exabytes in 2017 as more phones and machines connect to faster, next-generation networks, Cisco Systems Inc. said in a new report released Tuesday. In Canadian highlights for an annual update of its Visual Networking Index data usage forecast, Cisco said mobile data traffic in Canada will grow 2.8 times faster than fixed Internet traffic between 2012 and 2017, climbing to 153,595 terabytes per month, or roughly 0.15 exabytes, in 2017, representing about a nine-fold increase from 16,233 terabytes per month in 2012. Global mobile data traffic will grow slightly faster, at a compound annual growth rate of 66 per cent, Cisco said. “In Canada, mobile data traffic will account for 5% of Canadian fixed and mobile data traffic in 2017, up from 1% in 2012,” said Canadian highlights to the report, which Cisco provided to The Wire Report in advance of its release. Cisco said growth in Canadian and global mobile data consumption will result from higher smartphone and tablet penetration rates, rising use of machine-to-machine technology, and faster mobile network speeds. It said global mobile connections, including machine-to-machine, will climb 8.3 per cent annually, from 7 billion connections in 2012 to 10.3 billion in 2017. In Canada, the report forecasted, there will be 66 million mobile connected devices in 2017, including 25 million smartphones, 6.7 million tablets, and 26 million machine-to-machine connections. According to the data, smartphones will continue to generate more than half of Canada’s mobile data traffic in 2017, even as traffic across other devices grows at a faster pace. Cisco said smartphones will generate 79,780 terabytes of monthly traffic in Canada in 2017 and will account for about 52 per cent of the country’s total mobile traffic in 2017, down from 58 per cent in 2012. By the end of 2017, the report said, tablets will account for 31 per cent of mobile data traffic, up from 2.9 per cent in 2012, while machine-to-machine connections will generate seven per cent of overall mobile traffic, up from three per cent in 2012. Cisco said the average Canadian smartphone user will use 3,133 megabytes of mobile data per month in 2017, up 415 per cent from 608 megabytes monthly in 2012. “Eleven million mobile users will generate over two gigabytes a month in 2017, which is 38 per cent of total ,” Jeffrey Maddox, vice-president of systems engineering for Cisco’s service provider sales division, said in a telephone interview Monday. Maddox said faster network speeds will be a primary driver of mobile data consumption in Canada. He said the speed of the average Canadian mobile connection will rise from 4.5 Mbps in 2012 to 14.6 Mbps in 2017 as carriers expand their faster, fourth-generation LTE networks, allowing consumers to use more media-rich applications. Cisco’s Canadian statistics said mobile video traffic will grow ten-fold from 2012 to 2017, reaching 82,659 terabytes per month and comprising about 54 per cent of all mobile traffic. Cisco, a network technology company, has said its statistics in the annual Visual Networking Index are based on information from in-house and secondary sources, including data shared with Cisco by service providers. The company forecasted that LTE connections will account for 24.3 per cent of Canada’s mobile devices and machine-to-machine connections in 2017, up from 4.8 per cent in 2012. It said those connections will account for 51.9 per cent of the country’s total mobile traffic in 2017, up from 18.2 per cent at the end of 2012. “In Canada, 4G smartphone traffic will be 51% of total smartphone traffic in 2017, compared to 15% at the end of 2012,” the Canadian highlights to the report said. Cisco said the average LTE connection in Canada generated 1.7 gigabytes of monthly data in 2012, 4.4 times more data than the average non-LTE connection. LTE-enabled tablets will generate an average of 10,206 megabytes of traffic per month in 2017, compared to 5,331 megabytes for tablets that run on a older wireless networks, the report said. Maddox said the average mobile user in Canada will generate about five gigabytes of monthly data across all of their mobile devices in 2017. He said this is slightly lower than the six gigabytes the average North American user will generate, and suggested this may be due in part to Canadians’ more common practice of mobile data offloading onto WiFi networks. Cisco said 56 per cent of Canada’s mobile data was offloaded onto a fixed network in 2012 and predicted that to climb to 70 per cent by the end of 2017. Globally, it said, 33 per cent of mobile data traffic was offloaded in 2012 and 46 per cent will be offloaded in 2017. Maddox said monthly data caps used by Canadian carriers are partly responsible for a higher rate of data offloading. “Each region has various interpretations of how severely they've implemented things like data caps. Obviously, in Canada, they're quite common to users, whereas in a lot of other places, they're not nearly as common,” he said. “You definitely see the impact of the capped data plan model, where you have motivators for people to move off .” Cisco said the average machine-to-machine connection in Canada will use 390 megabytes of mobile data per month in 2017, a 23-fold increase over 73 megabytes per connection in 2012. Machine-to-machine modules accounted for 17.08 per cent of all device connections in 2012 and will rise to 39.2 per cent in 2017, Cisco forecasted. Machine-to-machine connections will generate 6.6 per cent of Canada’s mobile data traffic in 2017, it said, up from 2.74 per cent in 2012. —With reporting by Nicholas Kyonka at nkyonka@thewirereport.ca and editing by Simon Doyle at sdoyle@thewirereport.ca

Canadian mobile traffic to rise nine-fold by end of 2017, Cisco says

News | 02/05/2013 11:07 pm EST

Unlock all the Canadian telecom, broadcasting and digital media news you need.

FREE TRIAL

SUBSCRIBE

Reuse & Permissions

Inside The Wire Report

Information

Hill Times Publishing

Get in Touch With Us