Stefan Vitzithum, COO

Worldwide smartphone traffic is set to increase tenfold by 2019 to 18.2 exabytes per month. Germany is expected to contribute 259.8 petabytes, corresponding approximately to the data volume of 65 million DVD’s. This is the conclusion come to in a forecast made by Cisco Visual Networking Index. It is claimed that the rapid growth is due predominantly to the growing prevalence of smartphones and the increase in personal data consumption. What does this mean for the mobile communications market?

Smartphone traffic to increase tenfold by 2019

STUDY CISCO VISUAL NETWORKING INDEX

Mobile data volume will also increase considerably due to ever quicker networks and the connected use of data-intensive contents such as HD videos. Experts expect the monthly data volume per smartphone to increase five times to up to four gigabytes per smartphone worldwide by 2019.

Mobile data consumption has been rising rapidly in Germany for years now, as revealed by the trade association BITKOM. For 2015, 480 million gigiabytes of traffic is expected:

Mobile data volume increasing rapidly

The result of this development is that turnover with mobile data services is set to overtake turnover generated by calls made with mobile phones. According to BITKOM, network operators should for the first time earn more money with transferred data than with calls made on mobile phones in 2015:

Mobile data services overtaking mobile voice services

These figures show that mobile networks must increasingly offer better performance in order to be able to provide customers with the required data speed when and where they want it. It will be interesting to watch the upcoming auction for the 700 megahertz frequencies. Offering an extensive network entails considerable financial investments, one of the main reasons why O2 and E-Plus have merged to form Telefónica Deutschland. In view of the above mentioned volume of data which has to be transported in a network, it is not enough to only reach customers via mobile channels, the option of using landline and WLAN also has to be offered. Accordingly, network providers are increasingly offering tariffs and options combining landline and mobile communications. In my opinion, this is in preparation for the fact that in the very near future there will be just one contract to cover everything.

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