According to market researchers at Gartner, the global mobile data volume is forecast to reach 52 million terabytes (TB) for the entire year of 2015. Compared with 2014, this equates to an increase of 59%. This growth is expected to continue until at least 2018 and reach a volume of 173 million TB.
Gartner also published the results of a parallel study from the third quarter of 2014. The analysts surveyed 1,000 smartphone owners in the US and 1,000 smartphone owners in Germany on their use of mobile apps at the time. It was found that the freely available data volumes are much lower among German users than among American users. German users watch significantly fewer videos on their smartphones and tend to download large data packets less frequently. German respondents watched a video stream for 10.6 minutes on average, while Americans did so for 17.4 minutes.
Given that the percentage of mobile video usage compared with overall mobile data volume is forecast to increase from today’s figure of 50% to around 60% by 2018, Gartner recommends that providers significantly expand their free quotas. This would enable them to provide their customers with attractive offers and boost their sales. Companies should also make use of video optimisation technologies and cache movies and make them more accessible to customers. (Source: Gartner/rf)