Growth of Mobile Data Traffic Likely to Increase with Video Usage

Mobile data traffic in the Middle East and North East Africa is likely to grow 14 times between 2014 and 2020, mainly because of video usage in smartphones. The global traffic is expected to grow only by 9 times.

Growth of Mobile Data Traffic Likely to Increase with Video Usage

Patrik Melander, president and head of GCC, and Zain at Ericson said:

[pull_quote_center]Data-intensive utility, communication and entertainment services are commonly used by smartphone owners. Mobile video traffic will continue to grow driven by video streaming services and increasing prevalence of video in social media.[/pull_quote_center]

The data traffic and production of mobile technologies is increasing at a rapid speed. The data traffic will increase from 0.8GB in 2014 to 5GB in 2020.

Lisa Nyman, head of strategy and business innovation at Ericsson Middle East and North East Africa, said the global video traffic will grow more than 13 times in 2020. By 2020, 60 per cent of the mobile traffic will come from video.

Nyman also said that LTE subscriptions are likely to grow 50 times, exceeding 210 million by 2020. The LTE subscribers will be 20%. Out of 970 million mobile subscriptions expected at the end of 2020, 40% will come from smartphones. 40 percent of the countries in the region have LTE technology but it is still equal to 1 percent of the global subscriptions, most of which are present in the Gulf countries.

The Gulf, and particularly the UAE and Qatar, have “highest smartphone adoption rates” in the world. Whereas Pakistan, Afghanistan, and North East African countries are far behind.

Mobile traffic in the Gulf region is likely to reach 1700 Petabytes (PB) per month by the end of 2020 mainly by video usage.

Nyman said:

[pull_quote_center]The fixed-line broadband is not properly deployed in the region and that is why mobile is the main method of accessing the internet.[/pull_quote_center]