Video content accounts for 40 percent to 60 percent of total data traffic on wireless networks according to new data from Bytemobile.
In the future, it might be more. Verizon Wireless, for example, seems to be cooking up an out of market “video plus broadband” plan, working with DirecTV. During its recent quarterly earnings report, Fran Shammo, Verizon Communications EVP said that the company was working on such an effort.
Indeed, in 2010 Coda Research Consultancy predicted that by 2012, video would repreent 100 percent of all wireless network capacity during peak times. Coda also predicted that by 2015, mobile video would represent 66 percent of all mobile data traffic, and we are just about there. Mobile video traffic
“You’re going to see that come in the fourth quarter with the what we now call the Cantenna, which is not a commercial name obviously, but it’s the antenna that we actually trialed with DIRECTV, which was extremely successful,” said Shammo.
Some will legitimately wonder whether that approach might even wind up being used in some Verizon markets where FiOS has not already started to be deployed. LTE plus DirecTV
Such an effort would supply linear TV over the DirecTV network, but also mean the mobile LTE network is used in place of a standard cable modem or digital subscriber line “high speed Internet access” service. And that means people will be connecting PCs and other devices to the LTE network, while using that connection in the same way they use DSL or cable modem service. And that means lots of bandwidth.
In 2011, U.S. consumers were spending about four hours, 28 minutes each month watching Internet video. And that has clear implications for LTE data consumption.
Verizon currently caps mobile LTE usage, starting at 2 GBytes for $30 per month. That obviously raises issues about the practicality of streaming video consumption that could easily resemble PC consumption patterns.
Fixed LTE service?
A two-hour Netflix movie viewed in high-definition mode requires about 3.6 Mbytes. On a standard smart phone plan, that puts a user over the limit by watching a single HD movie each month.
A Netflix-streamed TV show, lasting 30 minutes and viewed in high definition will consume about 1.5 Gbytes. You see the problem both consumers and Verizon Wireless will have.
On average, mobile subscribers consume their total daily video content in a single session, meaning they have set aside some amount of time to watch video, but tend to watch multiple items during each session, according to the Bytemobile report.
On average, mobile video subscribers watch 10 videos sequentially, each viewing lasting about 60 seconds.
On a typical day, 17 percent of laptop subscribers consume video content, compared to 11 percent of iPhone subscribers and seven percent of Android subscribers.
Mobile subscribers also are choosing to watch more video at higher resolution, which means they also are consuming more bandwidth, Bytemobile says.