“There are two factors driving mobile data traffic. The first one is the growth of smartphones. We see tremendous growth around the world when it comes to smartphone adoption. The second factor is the growth in the average data consumption per device,” Rahim said.
Ericsson data shows that the average monthly data consumption in 2014 of a smartphone is about 1 GB. By 2020, this would have grown to 4.9 GB. The same is true for other devices. A tablet today would consume around 1.9 GB of data monthly, but in 2020 consumption is expected to grow to 8.4 GB. For laptops, monthly consumption day is around 4.2 GB, growing to 17.3 GB by 2020.
“If you look at the specific service that the users will actually be using, we can see that today, video accounts for 45% of mobile data traffic. By 2020, it will be 60%,” he said.
Australia and Singapore have the best network performance in the region due to their leadership in deploying LTE and LTE Advanced. Ericsson said this meant that the gap in network performance with other countries across the region has widened.
“However, we expect developing countries’ networks will greatly improve in performance over the coming years,” Afrizal concluded.