Archive for March 2015
The just released ACMA report Australians’ Digital Lives which is here shows the increasing use of the internet in the lives of Australians.
It points to 92% of Australians going on line in the 6 months to May 2014 and 100% of those aged 18 to 44 doing so. On the other hand 6% (1.1M adult Australians) said that they had never used the internet.
94% of Australian have a mobile phone and 74% of these were smartphones. 70% of Australians used a mobile to access the internet
The above ACMA grapic shows that data downloaded in the June quarter 2014 was just over one Exabyte(one billion GB) and that downloads via mobiles were 4% of this. The mobile phone data downloads however were doubling each year. In the June quarter 2014 ABS reported that a fixed broadband user on average downloaded 52GB per month while a mobile subsciber downloaded 80 times less at 630MB per month on average.
An interesting info-graphic published by GSMA Intelligence at Mobile World Congress 2015 above shows the world mobile service penetration.
While registered mobile connections (7.05Bn SIM cards) to world population (7.29BN people) is 97% because on average each mobile subscriber has 1.79 SIM’s the total unique mobile subscribers according to GSMA is 3.64Bn. Of these 3.64Bn mobile users 64% already use their phones to access the internet and 36% just use voice calls and text messages.
GSMA say the addressable population for mobile ownership (those over 14 y.o.) is 5.39Bn so the number of unique subscribers to addressable population is 68%. As such there is still room for growth of users as well as for data usage as more people subscribe and more convert to data capable smart phones.
Obviously the customer growth potential is dominantly in the less developed world with near saturation in numbers of unique subscribers in the developed markets.
In Australia ACMA’s 2013-14 Communications Report stated that 94% of Australia’s 23.8M population over 14 (19.3 M people) used a mobile. Thus with 31 million SIM subscriptions in Australia there are 1.7 SIM cards on average for each unique mobile subscriber.
With 94% device penetration most of the mobile growth in Australia (and in the developed world generally) will be generated by further migration to smart phones and more data use particularly by consumption of video content on these devices. As well multiple SIMs per person are likely to increase as people adopt tablet and PC’s with wireless connection and the “things” part of the Internet of Things greatly increase in number.
Director General GSMA Anne Bouverot
In a report Mobile Economy 2015 launched by GSMA’s Director General Anne Bouverot at Mobile World Congress GSMA says that the world’s 3.6 billion unique subscribers (50% of the world’s population) have 7.3 billion subscriptions (SIM connections) and will grow by one billion to 4.6Bn subscribers (59% of the world’s population) with 10Bn SIM subscriptions by 2020.
The GSMA report further says that smartphones in use will go from 2.6Bn in 2014 to 5.9Bn by 2020 during which time the precentage of connections on 3G and 4G networks will rise from 39% to 69%. The data carried on cellular networks is projected to grow by a factor of 10 from 2014 to 2019.
Other big picture statistics from the report include that the mobile industry worldwide contributes US$3.0Tn to GDP and supports 13 million direct plus 11.8 million indirect jobs. World mobile operator revenue in 2014 was reported
to be US$1.15Tn and mobile operators collectively were projected to spend US$1.5Tn in CAPEX between 2015 and 2020.
The GSMA Mobile Economy 2015 report is here and the summary infographic to the report is here.
“A decade ago, just one in five of the global population was a mobile subscriber – we have now surpassed the 50 per cent milestone and can look forward to connecting a billion new subscribers over the next five years,” commented Anne Bouverot, Director General of the GSMA. “Mobile sits at the heart of a new ecosystem that is uniting the digital and physical worlds, and powering economic growth. At the same time, mobile operators continue to deploy networks to all corners of the globe, connecting unconnected citizens and addressing socio-economic challenges in areas such as digital and financial inclusion, healthcare and education.”
The GSMA has established a group to draw up industry agreed specifications for an embedded SIM card.
The industry and the GSMA recognise that with the prospect of over 10 billion Mobile to Mobile (M2M) subscriptions likely by 2020 as part of the Internet of Things (IoT) the issue and control of mobile subscriptions using traditional SIM cards will be impractical. The new standard which is being developed by a number of operators, network and device and SIM card suppliers.
The first technical definition was release in February to GSMA and SIM Alliance members.
There is more information on the GSMA web site here.
Not to be left behind in network speed bragging rights Optus yesterday announced it has achieved 480Mbps over its lab network at Macquarie Park in Sydney and at its “Gigasite” at Lambton in Newcastle. The 480 Gbps was achieved by LTE Carrier Aggregation (LTE-CA) using four 20MHz channels. Tay Soo Singtel’s CTO said that they used three TDD channels and one FDD in the trial along with a prototype Category 8 device.
Using 4X4 MIMO and only 2X20MHz of 2.3 GHz TDD spectrum Tay said that Optus was able to achieve 418Mbps in Macquarie Park indoors and 350Mbps outdoors in Newcastle.
Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access e-UTRA is the air interface standard of 3GPP’s Long Term Evolution (LTE). The standard provides for peak download rates of 299.6 Mbit/s for 4×4 antennas, and 150.8 Mbit/s for 2×2 antennas with 20 MHz of spectrum. LTE Advanced supports up to 8×8 MIMO antenna configurations with peak download rates of 2,998.6 Mbit/s in an aggregated 100 MHz channel. As such there is still room to up the bragging rights in the future. It will be a question of how much spectrum the operator has and how many MIMO layers are practical.
Just prior to World Mobile Congress in Barcelona Telstra made a number of announcements on the evolution of their LTE 4GX network and along with Ericsson Australia NZ’s CEO Håkan Eriksson outlined arrangements which will see Telstra collaborating with Ericsson’s 5G initiatives to “drive the standards, test new concepts and research the new architectures.”
Mike Wright Group Managing Director Networks announced that Telstra would;
- Deploy Category 9 capability on its LTE-Advanced 4GX network in selected capital cities by April 2015. This would allow compatible devices to aggregate up to three 20MHz LTE carriers to achieve peak download speeds up to 450Mbps (with uplink at 50Mbps). The Category 9 devices such as those built around Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 System on Chip will be available later in 2015.
- Following closed trials including at 2014 Melbourne Cup Telstra will integrate LTE Broadcast LTE-B into its network by May 2015. From then they will progressively enable permanent LTE-B channels at key venues and events leading to customer access to LTE-B later in 2015.
- Enable Voice over LTE (VoLTE) across its network by April 2015 leading to customers with compatible phones of which there are many (see here) being able to benefit from some of the VoLTE improvements and capabilities later in the year. Following the network changes Telstra would also trial Video over LTE (ViLTE) for video calling and voice over WiFI.
- Collaborate with Ericsson on development of 5G standards, participate with Ericsson on its 5G radio test bed in Stockholm in 2015 and later run a 5G field trial locally. They would also work with Ericsson on capabilities of their core network products many announced just prior to WMC here to lead to 5G ready evolved core.
- Telstra and Ericsson will also run a Machine Type Communications (MTC) (3GPP Release 13 planned March 2016) proof of concept with Telstra and selected industry partners. MTC is an enabler of the IoT (Internet of Things) see here for more information.
Full details of the Ericsson/Telstra collaboration are in the press release here .