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Cape Town - As mobile data continues to grow at exponential rates, it has emerged that just five applications are largely responsible for traffic.
According to the Ericsson Mobility Report, there are five apps in any given country that virtually dominate mobile data traffic, with a particular bias toward video and social media applications.
The report found that Facebook was universally popular in the US, South Korea and Spain, and consumed around 20% of mobile data traffic.
However, regional differences indicate that YouTube is making a strong showing as well as video streaming apps such as Netflix and, in South Korea, specifically, peer to peer TV app, AfreecaTV.
Instagram, Snapchat and Chrome made up the rest of the globally data demanding apps.
Massive data growth
The massive growth of video was also highlighted in the GSMA The Mobile Economy Sub-Saharan Africa report which found that video was a strong growth area for mobile.
"A number of factors are driving data traffic, including increasing levels of social media engagement, content-rich apps and
the increasing accessing of video content," the GSMA report says.
According to the organisation, Vodacom in SA saw a data increase of 81.7% to 253MB per smartphone, and by 25.2% to 743MB on tablets in the last year alone.
Ericsson said that video data traffic will grow at 45% per year to 2020 - that means that video consumption will grow 17 times larger in the next six years than in the previous six year period.
"Another prominent driver is that video is becoming an increasing part of online content, such as news, adverts, and social media. Video is increasingly shared via popular social sites, such as Twitter," the Ericsson report says.
Video content is a massive internet data driver. (Duncan Alfreds, Fin24)
In troubling news for broadcast TV, the Ericsson Consumer Lab reported that 2014 also saw a marked change in behaviour. More people watched streaming television than broadcast TV for the first time in the markets studied.
"Drivers for this change include the advent of 4G technology, the growth in smartphone and tablet usage, and a shift in consumer behaviour toward easy-to-use, on-demand services that offer cross-platform access to content," said the report.
Government priorities
But it is unlikely that South Africans will see the full benefit of these technologies as the country remains constrained by the slow delivery of critical 4G spectrum required for high speed mobile broadband.
While President Jacob Zuma mentioned that access to broadband was a government priority in his chaotic State of the Nation address, the president spent less than a minute elaborating on specific plans for mass mobile broadband roll-out.
"The year 2015 will mark the beginning of the first phase of broadband roll-out. Government will connect offices in 8 district municipalities," Zuma said, before adding mysteriously that Telkom will be the lead "agency".
However, in its 2015 Lekgotla, the African National Congress called for faster action in SA on digital TV migration which has an international deadline of 2015.
"Lekgotla has directed the finalisation of the digital migration process to support broadband roll out. Government must move with the necessary speed to meet the deadline of 15 June 2015," said the ANC.
The Department of Telecommunications and Postal Services has ambitious targets of 50% broadband access at 5mbps by 2016, 90% by 2020, and 100% at 10mbps by 2030 on the basis of just 33.3% in 2013.
A critical failure in the development of broadband in SA has been the unwillingness or inability of the SABC to make significant moves toward digital terrestrial television.
Data crunch
Analogue broadcasters currently occupy the critical 800MHz band, earmarked by government policy as ideal for the delivery of 4G networks.
A failure to assign broadband spectrum could see SA facing a data crunch as the number of smartphones continues to accelerate.
According to Ericsson, there were 800 million smartphone subscriptions added during 2014, resulting in a global total of 2.7 billion, up 40% from a total of 1.9 billion smartphones in 2013.
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