ABI Research expects the 4G/long term evolution (LTE) traffic to grow at 207 per cent in 2013.
According to the research firm in 2012, the total mobile data traffic reached 13,412 petabytes, registering a year-on-year (y-o-y) growth of 69 per cent. During the same period, the 3G data usage registered y-o-y growth of 130 per cent.
ABI Research says that the higher data usage and the increasing number of smartphone application downloads is resulting in huge growth in mobile data traffic. In 2012, the smartphone application downloads stood at 36.2 billion registering a growth of 88 per cent over 2011.
In 2012, Asia-Pacific with 39 per cent of the total smartphone application downloads has overtaken North America which accounted for 25 per cent of the smartphone application downloads. Further, IP/web browsing constituted 51 per cent of the total mobile data traffic in 2012.
By 2018, large mobile device screens and 4G data-speeds are expected to stimulate mobile video streaming/downloads which will account for 56 per cent of total traffic. According to ABI Research, while smartphone applications promote the adoption of mobile data tariffs, over-the-top instant messaging and VoIP services are impacting the operators? messaging and voice revenue models
