Cisco Confirms Slower Mobile Traffic Growth
The telco problem is how to sell all the capacity coming online. Cisco's Visual Network Index offers the best data anywhere on current mobile trends as well as respected future forecasts. You can spend hours on the report. Skip quickly over the discussion at the top, which emphasizes select data points suggesting growth. Jump into the charts and tables. Here're some of the first things I noticed.
Growth in the U.S. is down to 50%/year and predicted to fall below 40%. Traffic soared as people first acquired smartphones, over 100% for a couple of years. 75% of the devices in the U.S. today are smart. "Average smartphone usage grew 43 percent in 2015. The average amount of traffic per smartphone in 2015 was 929 MB per month, up from 648 MB per month in 2014." The smartphone conversion still has a way to go, perhaps to 95% in a few years. The new users will continue to raise the growth rate, but much less than in the past. On the other hand, only 12% of the devices in the Middle East and Africa are "smart." $50-$100 smartphones are already changing that rapidly. Cisco expects the percentage to rise to over 50% by 2020, driving traffic growth rates much higher. Africans are buying so many smartphones there will be more Africans on the web than Americans around 2018. Detailed table below
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Market for mobile chips disappearing. When Henry Samueli shut down Broadcom's cellular baseband business, I happened to be visiting one of the founders. Many of the 3,000 engineers affected were his friends and the pain was apparent. However, I could see why the decision was necessary. Apple and Samsung dominate the mobile phone business and each made their own chips. Those two companies had growing market share and there just wasn't enough merchant business to sustain the chip vendors. Qualcomm's scale gives them a major advantage and the very efficient Mediatek has also grown.
FT/Orange Spain going to 10M & 14M. Without much publicity, Spain has pulled far ahead of other large nations in fiber homes. The U.S., Italy and France have passed fewer than 25%, Germany and England less than 10%.