Wednesday, April 12, 2017

Internet Access Providers are in the Post-PC Era

Nearly two decades ago, consumer demand for internet access was driven primarily by consumers using personal computers. These days, smartphones tend to drive accounts. In the future, sensor connections are likely to dominate growth. That is one example of what, a decade ago, we started to call the post-PC era. In terms of shipments, other computing devices surpassed shipments of PCs in 2010 or 2011.

In terms of installed base, smartphones and PCs

The implications for internet access providers are significant, in consumer markets, important, but less so, in enterprise markets. The reason is that consumers do most of their computing or internet-app activities on smartphones and other devices, not PCs. PCs still are the workhorse for enterprises.

 Global Mobile Data Traffic, 2016–2021
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
CAGR
By Application Category (TB per Month)
Web, data, and VoIP
2,153,676
2,938,884
3,779,988
4,674,801
5,538,615
6,434,681
24%
Video
4,375,000
7,225,123
11,415,329
17,564,661
26,067,686
38,148,326
54%
Audio streaming
559,999
843,394
1,193,711
1,620,662
2,103,876
2,674,183
37%
File sharing
151,874
258,617
403,273
592,352
820,954
1,102,867
49%
By Device Type (TB per Month)
Non-smartphones
109,505
137,852
169,955
199,173
236,257
269,189
20%
Smartphones
5,887,078
9,328,403
14,076,023
20,710,278
29,484,004
42,017,358
48%
Tablets and PCs
1,085,059
1,514,749
2,040,640
2,681,672
3,457,800
4,439,720
33%
M2M
157,998
284,415
505,292
861,025
1,409,949
2,224,543
70%
Other portable devices
910
599
391
328
432
659
-6%
By Region (TB per Month)
North America
1,411,021
2,000,301
2,776,564
3,753,177
4,838,494
6,397,092
35%
Western Europe
736,377
1,084,396
1,534,120
2,167,831
3,019,843
4,189,615
42%
Asia Pacific
3,109,117
4,900,007
7,434,743
11,048,030
15,911,056
22,845,908
49%
Latin America
449,944
688,890
1,023,408
1,475,498
2,078,670
2,898,651
45%
Central and Eastern Europe
923,803
1,396,079
2,013,989
2,836,076
3,886,561
5,252,334
42%
Middle East and Africa
610,286
1,196,346
2,009,476
3,171,864
4,853,817
7,367,869
65%
Total (TB per Month)
Total Mobile Data Traffic
7,240,550
11,266,018
16,792,300
24,452,476
34,588,442
48,951,469
47%
Source: Cisco Mobile VNI, 2017


Still, some eight billion devices were connected to mobile networks alone in 2016, and smartphone traffic (as distinct from the number of used devices) dwarfs PC traffic.




The point is that smartphones now drive traffic, while machine-to-machine communications and internet of things likely will drive device growth and internet access connections.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Is Sora an "iPhone Moment?"

Sora is OpenAI’s new cutting-edge and possibly disruptive AI model that can generate realistic videos based on textual descriptions.  Perhap...