New mobile traffic and business stats

The Swedish regulator, PTS, released its telecom usage statistics for the first 6 months of 2012. The report is unfortunately at the moment available only  in Swedish (short English abstract included, though)  We can report some interesting figures  for the mobile community, though:  The number of mobile subscriptions is now 13M (on a population of 9.5M). In total there are now more than 6M Mobile data subscriptions – unfortunately for the “capacity crunch”, only about 80K  LTE (4G) subscriptions – the reason is of course the limited availability of LTE terminals. This figure is rapidly increasing, though (up from 10K last year).  The typical user – the one with a combined voice/data subscription (purple and green bars in the figure) consumed almost 0.9 GB/month, whereas the data only subscriber gobbled up more than 4GB/month.  The “exponential” growth in total traffic continues .. up by 73%  to  73 petabyte for the first half year (42 pB in 2011).

A noteworthy fact is that SMS-traffic seems (finally?) to have passed its apex.  For the first time in the history of the measurements, SMS-traffic is no longer increasing, it is actually down 11%.  However the Swedish cellular consumer still sends 117 SMS/month –  on the average.

Read the full report

More PTS stats

About Jens Zander

Professor Jens Zander is professor in Radio Communication Systems at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. He has been among the few in Swedens Ny Teknik magazine's annual list of influential people in ICT that have been given the epithet “Mobile Guru”. He is one of the leading researchers in mobile communication and is the Scientific director of the industry/academia collaboration center Wireless@KTH. His research group focuses on three main areas – the efficient and scalable use of the radio frequency spectrum, economic aspects of mobile systems and application and energy efficiency in future wireless infrastructures.
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3 Responses to New mobile traffic and business stats

  1. Regarding the SMS’s I don’t think it is a matter of behavior. I think it is a matter of alternative services. For example Apples iMessage which has reduced my sms usage to less than 50%. And as far as I know, the kids (who used to be the most frequent sms users) use Kik nowadays.

  2. jzander says:

    Exactly, Maria.  We actually expected this to happen earlier. The cost for an SMS is still a few  Eurocents – all the other stuff is for free once you have a MBB subscription.  However if your friends do not  have Smartphones or aren’t using your particular service.. SMS you know will get there – thats why the market grip is still strong, despite the obvious cost factors

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