Mobile Trends: Should We Really Call this a Smartphone?

IMHO (in my honest opinion), the day will come when the term smartphone will sound like the term “horseless carriage.” This kind of prognostication has been made before about “VoIP” by Vint Cerf. However, we may get there before VoIP based on growth.

According to the latest Cisco Report VNI report on the mobile Internet, we are seeing almost half of the data growth coming from smartphones. The traffic has more than doubled thanks to social networks, movie watching and music listening. In other words, the smartphone is the home and roam device.

According to the text of the report “much” of the data traffic happens while the user is at home. Anecdotally, I can tell you I was recently helping one of our daughters and asked her to use her laptop.  Instead she brought her “smartphone” with all her notes. Her laptop has become irrelevant to her work style.   So the phone has replaced the laptop for her, but for many people it’s replacing the TV instead. Verizon’s deal with Redbox comes at a time when the cable operators have embraced the smartphone/ tablet as another screen and Netflix represents more than a quarter of the data usage on the smart phone.

VoIP represented about 3 percent of the growth, hardly a blip on the grand scale we are seeing. The result is that over the top is really over the top. What we are watching and doing is not something the phone network is signaling, messaging or managing and it is very relevant to the discussion. Solutions around the carrier are an equal way of managing the data needs the carriers can offer and given the growth of off load it has the advantage of being universal. Carrier traffic has the aggregation centers embedded in their networks and may lend themselves to anomalies in meet point hand offs. When the carrier looks to hand off on WiFi the impact is the traffic is closer to the source. This helps the “Cloud” become (aka the Internet) the more universal place to support the traffic.

The cloud according to the report  “will account for 71 percent (7.6 exabytes per month) of total mobile data traffic in 2016, compared to 45 percent (269 petabytes per month) at the end of 2011. Mobile cloud traffic will grow 28-fold from 2011 to 2016, a compound annual growth rate of 95 percent.”

All of this points to a very different market than what we sometimes hear from our carriers about the consumers. According to the report there are 100 million users worldwide that represent the 1GB usage club and the top 1 percent is now starting to flatten out as the early adopters are being joined by the rest of us laggards in data use.

So the traffic continues to double, the usage-based models continue to face pressure and the congestion continues to be a concern. In Austin, at our 4GWE Conference, I will be adding a track about WiFi. The reality is that WiFi has become essential to carrier network planning and we intend to demonstrate why.