Canadian mobile data traffic, speeds up almost 100% in 2013: Cisco

The average mobile connection speed of Canadian smartphones nearly doubled in 2013, climbing to more than 10 Mbps, Cisco Systems Inc. said in a new report released Wednesday. In Canadian highlights for an annual update of its Visual Networking Index data usage summary, Cisco said the average smartphone connection speed in Canada in 2013 reached 10,777 kbps, or 10.5 Mbps, up from 5,824 kbps, or about 5.7 Mbps, in 2012. The reason for that increase, Cisco executives said, is the spread of smartphones and next-generation LTE devices in particular, which offer faster maximum data speeds and are typically better equipped to handle data-rich traffic like mobile video. “Smarter devices are actually driving the vast majority of that traffic,” Tom Barnett, a director of Cisco’s service-provider marketing division, said of the faster Canadian traffic during a phone interview Tuesday. “The good news for Canadians and Canadian services providers is … they do have a faster connection, investment has been made in 3G and 4G technology.” In its report, Cisco said the average Canadian mobile connection speed will continue to climb to about 18.2 Mbps in 2018, while the global average smartphone connection speed will rise from 3.9 Mbps in 2013 to 6.9 Mbps in 2018. The company said some Canadians are taking advantage of faster LTE service speeds to consume more data. “In 2013, the average smartphone in Canada generated 1,067 megabytes of mobile data per month — up from 728 megabytes per month in 2012,” said Canadian highlights to the report, which Cisco provided to The Wire Report in advance of its release. “In Canada, the average 4G smartphone generated 1,982 MB of traffic per month in 2013, compared to 920 MB for non-4G smartphones.” According to the Canadian highlights, LTE devices accounted for 13.8 per cent of Canada's mobile connections in 2013, and will grow to account for 40.3 per cent of mobile devices by 2018. There were 18 million connected smartphones in Canada last year, the highlights said, up 21 per cent from 2012. That number will climb to 28 million by 2018, it predicted. The company said there were 35 million total mobile devices in Canada in 2013, including 4.2 million devices that were added to Canadian networks last year. About 3.1 million of those new devices were smartphones, the company added. In all, smartphones accounted for 52.7 per cent of mobile device connections in 2013, the company said, and 67.9 per cent of all mobile traffic. Cisco said there were 25.6 million “mobile users” in Canada in 2013 who generated a total of 28.6 petabytes of traffic each month, or about 30 million GB each month. It said Canadian mobile traffic doubled over the last year and that it would grow ninefold between 2013 and 2018, by which time it predicted that Canadians networks would handle 246.8 petabytes, or about 250,000 terabytes, of traffic each month, including smartphone, laptop, tablet and machine-to-machine traffic. Annual mobile traffic, the company said, will reach three exabytes by 2018, with consumers accounting for 81 per cent of that traffic. LTE smartphones will account for 61 per cent of all mobile data traffic by 2018, compared to 25.8 per cent by the end of 2013, the Canadian highlights to the Cisco report said. Shruti Jain, a senior analyst with Cisco's service provider marketing team, said in an interview that the higher-powered LTE devices will continue to give consumers a greater ability to consume mobile data in the years ahead as device manufacturers continue to increase their devices' computing power. “That's what accounts for that increase , along with the deployment of high-definition video and all the high-definition applications that are being rolled out and that can be consumed over these new-fangled devices,” she said. The Cisco report said Canadian mobile video traffic will also grow ninefold from 2013 to 2018, and will account for 133,418 terabytes of traffic each month by 2018. It said video traffic accounted for 51 per cent of all mobile video traffic in 2013 and will account for 54 per cent of all mobile traffic by 2018. Audio streaming, Cisco predicted, will account for 19 per cent of mobile data traffic in 2018, up from 13 per cent in 2013, while filesharing will make up six per cent of that traffic in 2018, up from five per cent last year. Cisco said mobile data traffic would grow three times faster than fixed-IP traffic between 2013 and 2018 and will account for seven per cent of Canadian data traffic in 2018, up from three per cent in 2013. It predicted that the average mobile device will consume 5.7 GB of data each month by 2018, excluding machine-to-machine connections, up from 902 MB per month in 2013. “In Canada, mobile traffic per user will reach 7,865 megabytes per month by 2018, up from 1,106 megabytes per month in 2013,” the Canadian highlights said. Cisco, a network technology company, has said its statistics in the annual Visual Networking Index are based on information from in-house and secondary sources, including data shared with Cisco by service providers. — With reporting by Nicholas Kyonka at nkyonka@thewirereport.ca and editing by Derek Abma at dabma@thewirereport.ca

Canadian mobile data traffic, speeds up almost 100% in 2013: Cisco

News | February 5, 2014

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Canadian mobile data traffic, speeds up almost 100% in 2013: Cisco

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