ul
Melvin Amey
Overall monthly data consumption in gigabytes is determined by multiplying the amount of time spent online per day (measured in hours) by the data usage intensity of the applications used during that time (measured in GB/hour). The amount of time spent online appears to plateau at three to four hours a day for mobile (per individual) and six to 10 hours a day for fixed (per home). However, the data intensity of applications like videos and social networks is continuously increasing, which in turn drives up the hourly, and ultimately, the monthly data consumption.
Our data consumption forecast already includes all these expected trends. However, pushing the boundary of time spent per day using the most data-intensive applications could lead to extreme scenarios. For example, a household consuming 4K content for 12 hours a day would use 3,600 GB in one month. This scenario illustrates how technical leapfrogging of device capabilities and data hunger of applications may generate faster, more excessive data growth, which would affect underlying network investment requirements and their ability to ensure value and enable full experiences.
Assessing the rise of Gigabit LTE with Telecom Italia Mobile among those leading the charge
Download ===== https://t.co/X1OnGrn3Tp
Many publications report periodically on the growth of average data consumption (mostly focused on mobile), analyzing the differences between high-growth and low-growth markets. These reports provide a clear snapshot of the current state of data consumption and short- to medium-term forecasts. However, in this Report we delve deeper, analyzing the underlying demand-side factors that constitute actual data consumption as well as the supply-side factors that either constrain or fuel data consumption. We review both the mobile and the fixed side of these phenomena in order to forecast average data consumption between now and 2030.
In 2020, pandemic-induced behavioral changes precipitated a spike in usage; fixed GB/month increased between 50% and 100%, while mobile GB/month was muted due to multiple lockdowns. However, fixed growth showed a dip in 2021 to pre-pandemic levels of around 20% by 2022, while mobile growth sprang back to pre-pandemic levels of 25% as soon as lockdowns were lifted. These permanent step increases in post-pandemic average data consumption are strong indicators of permanent changes in user behavior, namely greater consumption of digital services.
There are large variations in mobile data usage among European countries. Markets like Austria, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden, and Denmark already exhibit usage of 20 or more GB/month, due to multiple factors including the availability of relatively low-priced high-volume data bundles, faster 5G rollout, a lack of nationwide FTTP (fiber to the premise) networks, and behavioral demand factors like mobile consumption of video and social network content. Other markets still show usage below 10 GB/month.
Fixed data consumption among countries in Europe also varies. Markets like Spain, Portugal, Latvia, and Lithuania, with high FTTP coverage, also exhibit higher fixed data consumption. Factors like the rollout of FTTP and the availability of higher-speed bundles will continue to drive growth of fixed data in their respective markets. Behavioral demand factors, such as the widespread use of streaming video services in markets like the UK, induce higher data consumption.
Video and social networking continue to drive data consumption due to increased penetration of higher-resolution content and the move toward live sports streaming. We scanned a broad range of publications to identify the most popular mobile and fixed use cases and the average time spent on them. We then assessed the underlying data-intensity requirements for those activities to estimate the overall GB/month, broken down by fixed and mobile, and further broken down by each activity.
Figure 1 shows additional details of the distribution of the above use cases in 2022 and 2030 and includes expected changes to overall composition, as well as the share of both time and data a user spends on each of these activities.
Video continues to be the main driver of data consumption, currently comprising approximately 60%-65% of total data consumption in Europe. We expect it to grow its share to 70%-75% by 2030, due to more penetration of higher-resolution content and the move toward live sports streaming. The average European spends approximately three to four hours a day watching videos, with most of those hours spent at home using a television, a tablet, or another large-screen device. Approximately one hour a day is also spent watching videos on mobile handsets while outside the home. Popular video service providers such as YouTube and Netflix are used, as well as the over-the-top (OTT) platforms of traditional and pay-TV operators. The availability of live sports via OTT players is a popular recent development.
Currently, most videos are viewed in HD, requiring 1-3 GB/hour, and we expect this to increase to 8-10 GB/hour as the average quality improves from HD to 4K by 2030. Although higher quality, like 8K, is already available, we believe this will be a niche in the same period. Substantial 8K content and mass-market adoption of suitable viewing devices, like 8K TVs, are not widely available. We believe video consumption will evolve from HD to 4K by 2030, and most content available will be 4K by then. The mix of content in terms of resolution at the end of the time horizon as assumed in our model is 70% HD, 25% 4K, and 5% 8K.
Simultaneous viewing of live sports via OTT applications has a limited impact on overall monthly data consumption, as it simply serves as a substitute for other types of video content, though it has relevant impacts on other KPIs, such as the busy hour throughput of telecom operator networks.
Coming in second to video in terms of data intensity, social networking takes the highest share of time on mobile, currently contributing the maximum time spent per day per user in the range of one to two hours a day. Over the long term, we believe the time spent by users on social networks will expand to three to four hours daily, as social networks continue to serve as substitutes for real-world interactions. At the same time, social networks are becoming more data-intensive.
The activities that comprise social networks have evolved from messaging a decade ago (e.g., over Facebook, Orkut, Google+), to posting images five years ago (e.g., Instagram), to posting short-form videos (e.g., TikTok) and multimedia-rich stories today. Soon, we anticipate an even larger share of higher-quality videos, and perhaps a Metaverse-enabled social experience in the future, which effectively requires multiple streams of simultaneous video and images in order to create an immersive experience.
In addition, these video- and image-rich apps are assumed to be guided by AI algorithms to pre-download content, which keep the user firmly engaged in an infinite scrolling experience without the need to pause and load the latest content. This process in turn increases the underlying data consumption.
The amount of time spent gaming can be as high as 8-10 hours a day for homes with active gamers, but accounts for less than an hour a day on average in a typical European home. As gaming moves to the cloud, factors such as latency, more multiplayer gaming, and broadcasting games via apps like Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook, will play a more significant role than data consumption.
Nonetheless, we expect this consumption category to remain at a level below 1 GB/hour for mobile in the period until 2030. However, it could rise to 4-8 GB/hour for fixed, as some e-commerce activities have the potential to be carried out in the Metaverse.
Web browsing was one of the first use cases when the Internet gained mass-market acceptance in the 1990s, and we believe users will continue to spend time, estimated at a half-hour per day, browsing websites, despite competition from apps and other forms of digital experiences. Data intensity will increase with a move toward richer HTML5-based content.
Websites are constantly evolving as well, from early, plain HTML text websites to more image-rich websites, to HTML5-type websites displaying high-resolution images and videos and featuring smooth, continuous scrolling. This, in turn, will raise the amount of data required per hour, reaching levels of 1 GB/hour by 2030.
Cloud services, music streaming, background-operating system updates, and so on, constitute the remaining longtail of use cases, which consumes data but on a much lower scale than the use cases mentioned above. We estimated usage around 1 GB/hour in our analysis.
Video dominates data consumption on both fixed and mobile, but social networking captures the largest time-share in mobile. In our analysis, we modify the time (hours) and data intensity (GB/hour) requirements to account for differences in using an application based on whether it uses mobile data or a fixed connection. For example, users spend the most time on social networking activities on their mobile devices; on a fixed connection the maximum time is spent watching videos. Additionally, the quality, and hence the data intensity, is higher on fixed networks for activities like video and social networking due to devices like TV, tablets, and laptops, whose larger screens allow higher resolutions.
The device mix determines data intensity and will differ for fixed networks and mobile networks. Fixed data consumption of video grows faster than mobile thanks to the greater presence of higher-resolution devices with large screens. We assume the primary device used to consume video is a TV with HD, with future upgrades to 4K and partially 8K occurring within the time horizon. Secondary devices for video consumption are assumed to be a second TV or a tablet that can handle HD. For e-commerce, Web browsing, and cloud activities, we assume a PC/laptop/tablet is the primary device at home versus a mobile handset for mobile. We also assume longer time spent (including background usage) on activities like cloud, music streaming, and so on, adjusted appropriately between fixed (PC/laptop/tablet) and mobile (handset).
bcf7231420