It is well understood that the proportion of in-building mobile data consumption is markedly higher than that of consumption in public places and while in motion. While historically this has been problematic for operators, given the issues surrounding in-building reception, it also provides the operators with the opportunity to offload the data traffic from the cellular network to other complementary networks based on WiFi and femtocells. The availability of WiFi hotspots (in restaurants, coffee shops, airports etc.) and already installed WiFi access points at homes defaults the data connection over to the WiFi network providing seamless connectivity. Meanwhile, femtocell technology – deployed primarily for improving coverage also provides an opportunity for data offload. In addition, offloading has the potential to create new services and applications and enhancing the usage of existing services.
According to our new report Data Offload & Onload, the percentage of traffic offloaded in developed markets will actually diminish towards the end of the forecast period, and will begin to plateau in several other regions due to the accelerating take-up of LTE. Despite this, however, the actual volume of data traffic offloaded from mobile networks will continue to grow strongly throughout the next five years as the total volume of data traffic delivered to mobile devices accelerates.
Thus, by 2015 the annual mobile data traffic offloaded from operators’ networks via WiFi and Femtocells is forecast to reach nearly 9,000 petabytes (PB) by 2015, which equates to a voluminous 11 billion movie downloads.
Our Mobile Data Offload & Onload video whitepaper is now available to watch here…
Tags: data offload, data onload, Data Traffic, Femtocells, mobile data, mobile data offload, WiFi, WiFi Data Offload
