[Satellite News 11-02-10] Informa Telecoms & Media estimates that the average traffic per smartphone user currently averages 85MB per month as smartphone users are generating two-thirds of the world’s total mobile cellular traffic and that this figure will increase 8-fold by 2015.
    “Despite the fact that only 13 percent of mobile subscribers use smartphones … these smartphone users spend more time on the Internet, the traffic that each one generates – their average traffic per user (ATPU) – will increase by a staggering 700 percent over the next five years,” said Malik Kamal-Saadi, principal analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media.
In Informa’s latest report, issued Nov. 2, Kamal-Saadi found that the iPhone is the highest-traffic-generating device followed by Android devices. According to Kamal-Saadi, the iPhone will retain this because Android devices will be spread across high-, mid- and low-user segments.
     “The traffic disparity between smartphone and non-smartphone is most pronounced in North America where 86 percent of mobile data traffic is currently generated by smartphone users, notably those using an iPhone or high-end Android devices … Also, because the iPhone will continue to target premium users with high ARPUs, it is likely to remain leading the ATPU worldwide with an estimated value of 196MB/month in 2010.” he said.
     ATPU could be used as a key differentiating parameter by operators to judge the popularity of different OS platforms and related ecosystems. According to Informa, Western Europe will enjoy rapid growth and the smartphone ATPU in the region will increase almost 17 times to over 736MB/month in 2015 from under 44MB/month in 2009. “The rapid growth in these regions will be driven by both the fast migration of subscribers to higher-speed mobile networks, the proliferation of flat rate data plans, and the availability of wide range of smartphones targeting different consumer groups with different lifestyles, which will enable users to consume content and services most relevant to them,” the report said.
     The highest smartphone ATPU comes from South Korea and Japan with respective values of 271MB/month and 199MB/month expected in 2010, which is 2-3 times higher than the global average.