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
