Mobile Usage Skyrockets In the Home

While it’s no surprise to anyone, Informa has taken the important step of quantifying what we already know: the majority mobile data traffic will be generated in the home.

In research released by Informa a couple of months ago and re-introduced this week, Informa estimates that 40% of mobile data usage happens in the home today, growing to 58% of traffic in 2013. It’s much cheaper and easier to offload that traffic onto the user’s own broadband network via Wi-Fi or femtocell than carry it over the macro RAN.

The research also notes that mobile voice usage in the home should rise to 49% of a subscriber’s total minutes in 2013, up from 42% today. Add in the estimated 30% of calls which happen in the office, and a whooping 70% of mobile voice usage happens indoors.

With more than half of all voice and data traffic being generated indoors, Wi-Fi or femto-based Home Zone services should be mandatory from operators in the near future.

Home zones do it all:

• Offload the macro network
• Backhaul voice/data traffic over the internet
• Create ‘home zone’ specific voice/data services and applications

UK Operators unleash ‘flat rate’ data plans

The BBC reported today that T-Mobile, Vodafone, Orange and Three offer flat rate price plans for internet access on mobile phones. O2 will launch a plan in October prior to the iPhone launch.

In the article, Richard Warmsley, head of internet at T-Mobile, comments that 500,000 people have signed up for their ‘web and walk’ service in 18 months. Mr. Warmsley goes on to add:

“Half of our customers surf the internet on their mobile when they are at home watching TV. They do not need to go to a laptop and fire it up. The mobile is there for them.”

Key take-away #1: As an operator, if 50% of your data traffic is generated at home, use Wi-Fi and UMA rather than the more expensive macro RAN.

Another interesting point in the article is that flat rate pricing apparently boosts downloads from an average of 0.18 megabytes to 0.60 megabytes, more than 3x in capacity.

Key take-way #2: Is your network ready for a 3x increase in data traffic/capacity, especially when 50% of that traffic is happening at home within range of Wi-Fi and could be off-loaded to broadband & IP?

There is a chart in the article which shows the different rates:

• T-Mobile - £7.50/month (1 GB limit)
• Vodafone - £7.50/month (120 MB limit)
• Orange - £8.00/month (30 MB limit)
• Three - £5/month (1 GB limit)
• O2 - £7.50/month (200 MB limit)

Key take away #3: As an operator, prices for flat rate data plans are going to come down. Clearly Three is already one third the price of the T-Mobile plan. Therefore, making massive capacity investments to support more traffic at less revenue per user is not ideal.

Wi-Fi, IP and broadband look more attractive all the time.