Why bother to offload when your LTE is fast and unlimited? Growth rates seven years ago approached 100% as people first got iPhones. They are much lower now. Verizon last year saw about a 45% growth in data per customer, confirming a trend to lower growth in traffic. Cisco (and I) have been predicting this fall for the last three years because smartphones are now nearly ubiquitous. AT&T and others have been telling Wall Street that customers with smartphones were only increasing usage by about 40%. (Trends worldwide are similar but details deserve another article. Some charts below and at Cisco)

Technology in wireless is moving so rapidly that telcos could increase capacity 8-10X in the next few years without raising capex. They may not because they won't be able to sell so much data. Cisco projects a 7X increase in demand in five years, less than the potential capacity increase. 

Logically, this extra capacity would be used to win customers, which is why TMO, Sprint, and now Verizon went "unlimited." (Quotes around "unlimited" because after 22-28 gigabytes you will be slowed when the network is congested.)

Cisco's remarkable VNI predicts telco traffic growth in the U.S. will slow to 33% in 2021. Video is the prime factor in wireless traffic and growth in mobile video usage is slowing. In addition, people have learned to do most of their video watching when connected to Wi-Fi to avoid being charged. Cisco's prediction is that offload to Wi-Fi will increase from 60% today to 63%. 

That perfectly reasonable projection may be out of date, as Verizon joins Sprint and T-Mobile with "unlimited" plans. Early data from Sprint is that offload went down when plans went unlimited. LTE is now over 10 megabits in most of the U.S., plenty to watch HD video. Wi-Fi speeds vary from room to room and as you walk around. Why bother switching when LTE is doing the job and bandwidth costs are nil?

Arielle Sumits of Cisco is wondering about this as well. The data is just coming in and Arielle sees possible countervailing trends. They haven't changed the forecast yet but are following closely. 

Other wireless traffic insights for 2021

Speeds will go up 200% to 20 Mbps. That's enough for at least three HDTV streams and loads of surfing, Facebook, and even Youtube. (My opinion) As we are seeing at Verizon, T-Mobile Netherlands, Finland, and all three in Korea, caps are already going up rapidly. In much of the developed world, the effective cap will be over 100 gigabytes and sometimes much higher.

"5G" will be only 1.5% of traffic in 2021. That's the almost invisible little green area on the top right of the picture. Projecting five years on technology that hasn't even reached field trials yet is challenging. Cisco's estimate seems right to me. No telco anywhere has publicly set a goal of more than 1% for 2020. Few have announced aggressive plans after that. NTT CTO Seizu Onoe is typical, not expecting much mmWave before 2022-2024. The hype cycle is so extreme most people are surprised at how little 5G mmWave is likely any time soon, but most of the people building networks see a modest build -1-3% - until 2013.

Almost all will be 4G. 4G is 3-10X as efficient as 3G as well as faster. From Jio in India China Mobile to Verizon in the U.S., carriers are doing everything they can to move customers to 4G. Cisco predicts it will be 79% of traffic in 2021. It may be higher.

Smartphones will be responsible for 48% of all fixed and mobile traffic by 2021. Telco wireless will be about 20% of traffic. Add the "smartphone to Wi-Fi" and almost half of all traffic will be to smartphones. Sumits sees this as an astounding trend considering how prominently PC traffic has always figured in IP traffic. In 2011, PCs generated 94 percent of total IP traffic. In 2021, PCs will be less than 30 percent.

There is far more data. Skip the summary at top and dig right into the data.  

Table 4.       Global Mobile Data Traffic, 2016–2021

 

Table 3.       Global and Regional Projected Average Mobile Network Connection Speeds (in Mbps)