UPDATED 12:57 EDT / FEBRUARY 02 2011

NEWS

Mobile Web Traffic Shooting High, Expected to Explode by 2015

A recent Cisco report has predicted the explosion of mobile web traffic by year 2015. The research revealed that only between year 2009 and 2010, the mobile data traffic has increased with a whopping rate of 159 percent. Moreover, it is expected to increase 26 times between 2010 to 2015. The credit for this dramatic increase in mobile browsing trends and web traffic goes to the increasing number of Internet-enabled devices such as smartphones and tablets. Besides, increased mobile video usage has also contributed a lot in this staggering growth.

“The fact that global mobile data traffic increased 2.6-fold from 2009 to 2010,” said Cisco vice president Suraj Shetty in a statement, “nearly tripling for the third year in a row, confirms the strength of the mobile Internet. The seemingly endless bevy of new mobile devices, combined with greater mobile broadband access, more content, and applications of all types — especially video — are the key catalysts driving this remarkable growth.”

In its report Cisco estimated India to experience highest growth in mobile web traffic at 158 percent, followed by South Africa with 144 percent and Mexico with 131 percent. On the contrary, countries like Unites States and United Kingdom are going to experience relatively slow growth of 83-84 percent. Assuming this Cisco’s forecast to be correct, we can expect the mobile connection speed to increase several times, over 4,400 Kbps.

Another mobility survey by World Wide Worx reports that around 30 percent of urban South Africans and 27 percent of rural ones use mobile browsers to access Internet on their cellphones. It also reported that Twitter has become a key mobile tool for most mobile web users.

As the trend of mobile browsing is shooting up, major players including Firefox, Safari, Opera and Google Chrome are working on their mobile versions and there are some new players too taking advantage of a new playing field, including Skyfire and Dolphin. While Skyfire recently updated its version for iPad, iPhone and Android, we also saw the latest version of Opera 11 featuring extensions, tab stacking and visual mouse gestures, a new –email panel, update checker and perhaps most notably, HTML5 support. Opera 11 Beta was launched a few days back along with extensions and other add-ons. Firefox also had an update back in July and improved its tab browsing.

Surprisingly, an eMarketer survey also revealed the preference of mobile web browsers over apps among US mobile phone subscribers. This “Adobe Mobile Experience Survey” conducted by Keynote systems revealed that than 60% of mobile users have a preference for mobile browsers, except for games, music and social media. The figures of this survey came out as a surprise thing for most app developers who assumed apps to be better than mobile web browsers.

Taking holiday shopping for instance, a couple of studies by LightSpeed Research and Orange indicate the shifting shopping activity from apps to mobile browsers, especially in U.S. and Europe. It informed that out of 3905 survey respondents, 54% preferred using mobile browsers to shop online rather than apps. This clearly reflects that mobile apps are going to face a tough competition from mobile web browsers.


A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU