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November 11, 2013

Video Drives Traffic in Most Regions, Web Browsing Drives Traffic in Africa

The latest study by Sandvine of global Internet traffic illustrates a couple of continuing trends. Video drives consumption in most regions, on both mobile and fixed networks, with the exception of Africa, where Web browsing drives the largest share of traffic.

Also, though fixed and mobile networks represent significant amounts of traffic in most regions, African traffic is driven largely by mobile users.

The mean (arithmetic average of all users) amount of data consumed by a North American fixed network Internet access customer in the second half of 2013 was  44.5 GB, about the same as the 44.7 GB observed in the first half of 2013, according to Sandvine.

About 38 Gb was downstream traffic, while upstream traffic was about 6.6 Gb. As has been the pattern for some time, video entertainment drove most of the traffic, about 67 percent for North American fixed network users.

The median monthly usage also remained virtually unchanged moving from 18.2 GB

to 17.6 GB.

But ISPs still estimate demand is growing at a 20 percent to 30 percent rate.

Mobile Internet access (mean consumption) grew from 390.1 MB to 443.5 MB, Sandvine says. Median usage (half of instances greater, half of instances lower), grew 43 percent from 58.7 MB to 84 MB.

About 385 Mb was downstream traffic, while upstream traffic represented 59 MB. Real-time entertainment traffic accounted for about 50 percent of the downstream bytes on the network.

European fixed network consumption was measured at a mean monthly usage of 17.4 GB with median monthly usage of 7.2 GB. About 48 percent of peak time downstream traffic was entertainment content.

European mobile network Internet traffic was measured at 358.4 MB, up 15 percent from the 311 MB observed in the first half of 2013. Median usage grew 28 percent from 13.2 MB to 16.9 MB. About 302 MB of the total traffic consisted of downstream bits, while upstream usage was 56 MB.

In Africa, where access is mostly by mobile devices, typically feature phones. Because of this, median monthly usage is less than 1.5 MB, and means monthly usage is just over 21 MB. Web browsing represents more than 40 percent of total traffic, with communications accounting for 28 percent of usage.

In Latin America, fixed network mean monthly usage is 10.0 GB and median monthly usage is 4.4 GB. Mobile network consumption has a monthly mean of 347.5 MB, with wide variation from country to country, in one instance varying from 343 MB to 2.7 GB in the same country, on 3G or 4G networks.

In the Asia-Pacific region, mean usage on fixed networks  was 35.4 GB, 24 GB downstream and 11 GB upstream.  On mobile networks, mean monthly usage grew from 700.4 MB to over 1 GB per month.

Also in the Asia-Pacific region, use of air cards for tethering PCs and other devices likely accounts for the heavy use by the one percent of subscribers consuming 29.2 percent of upstream data, 18.5 percent of downstream usage and 18.7 percent of aggregate bytes each month.




Edited by Stefania Viscusi


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