Measuring #mobile data traffic is important for operators, vendors, and policymakers. As I've said before, we should use *good* #metrics to measure the #telecoms industry, rather than just *easy* metrics. This post is an example of what I mean. Yesterday, Ericsson released its latest Mobility Report. It's always an interesting trove of statistics on mobile subscribers, networks and usage, with extra topical articles, sometimes written by customers or guests. While obviously it's very oriented to cellular technologies and has an optimistic pro-3GPP stance, it has a long pedigree and a lot of work goes into it. It's partly informed by private stats from Ericsson's real-world, in-service networks run by MNO customers. This edition includes extra detail, such as breaking out fixed-wireless access & separating video traffic into VoD #streaming (eg Netflix) vs. social media like TikTok and YouTube. It had plenty of golden "information nuggets". For instance, traffic density can be 500-1000x higher in dense urban locations than sparse rural areas. I'll come back to that another time. Global mobile data grew 36% from Q1'22 to Q1'23. The full model online predicts 31% growth in CY2023, falling to just 15% in 2028, despite adding in AR/VR applications towards the end of the decade. That's a fairly rapid s-curve flattening. For Europe, MBB data growth is predicted at 29% in 2023, falling to only 12% in 2028. That's a *really* important one for all sorts of reasons, and is considerably lower than many other forecasts. But what really caught my eye was this "#FWA data traffic represented 21% of global mobile data traffic at the end of 2022". Further, it is projected to grow much faster than mobile broadband (MBB) and account for *30%* of total traffic in 2028, mostly #5G. When the famous "5G triangle" of use-cases was developed by ITU, it didn't even mention FWA. However, the report didn't break out this split by region. So I decided to estimate it myself based on the regional split of FWA subscribers, which was shown in a graphic. I also extended the forecasts out to 2030. I then added an additional segmentation of my own - an indoor vs outdoor split of MBB data. I've pegged this at 75% indoors, aligning with previous comments from Ericsson and others. Some indoor MBB is served by dedicated in-building wireless systems, and some is outdoor-to-indoor from macro RAN or outdoor small cells. The result is fascinating. By the 2030, it is possible that over 40% of European 5G data traffic will be from FWA. Just 14% of cellular data will be for outdoor mobile broadband. So what's generating the alleged 5G GDP uplift? That has massive implications for spectrum policy (eg on #6GHz) and proposed #fairshare traffic fees. It also highlights the broad lack of attention paid to indoor cellular and FWA. Note: This is a quick, rough estimate, but it's the type of data we need for better decisionmaking. I hope to catalyse others to do similar analysis.
Link to the main Ericsson #MobilityReport page https://www.ericsson.com/en/reports-and-papers/mobility-report/reports/june-2023 Btw - if anyone from Ericsson would like to comment, or come up with a more concrete dataset to align with (or disagree with) my estimates, I’d be very happy!
That’s traffic, not # of access points. Wondering what does it say about what use cases it carries - namely, what IIoT contributes to it. And how does this play vis-a-vis fixed BB (will it come on top of or canibalize?!).
Hmm, that would kinda contradict the Fiberization program of EU, right? FWA is (aside from being an ESG-evil) the poorest of all monetization strategies...
Not sure why the surprise on % of FWA in total mobile data usage. I believe this is well known fact in all markets that started with FWA early like Austria and Finland. As less developed markets add more capacity into their mobile networks, they follow the same trail of the front runners, they try to fill the capacity the only way they know and this is FWA. No other service can fill the capacity that is being built. As an example, I'm sharing the Austrian RTR statistics on number of subscriptions (fix BB, FWA and smartphone) and avg. data usage per same category. It is easy to see that even though there is 3x more smartphone subscriptions than FWA subscriptions, FWA use is ~15x higher than smartphone use leading to much higher data use by FWA than by smartphones. There are always some market specifics, but more advanced markets are generally showing the way for less advanced markets.
Hmm. But any report referencing out to 2030 that only mentions sustainability twice and only in reference to one market is not addressing the future as some of us know it to be.
The stat on FWA is quite interesting. So what do you think should be considerations for spectrum when you see so much traffic in FWA?
Wow, thanks Dean - that is something. Forgive my ignorance but what is the methodology of measuring FWA traffic?
How would you clarify in train usage here Dean? It could be all three of these...
Please see my follow-on post about the policy & regulatory implications of this analysis: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/deanbubley_fwa-mbb-ran-activity-7077931306625425409-JUWH?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop