Smartphones take over half of mobile traffic worldwide

MANILA, Philippines - It’s a case of minority gets the majority. Today around the world, the small 13 percent of mobile subscribers that use smartphones are actually hogging 65 percent of the mobile traffic.

Given their mobile phones’ capability to go online, smartphone users spend more time on the Internet so that the average traffic per user (ATPU) now stands to reach 700 percent over the next five years, an eight-fold increase from the present level.

Informa Telecoms & Media, a London-based provider of business intelligence and strategic services to the global telecom and media markets, recently released these findings putting current ATPU per smartphone user at 85MB average per month.

ATPU is a new metric devised by Informa Telecoms & Media to help the mobile industry measure the potential of new services and revenue streams such as mobile advertising. Operators can also use ATPU as a key differentiating parameter for judging the popularity of different OS platforms and related ecosystems.

The highest smartphone ATPU is from South Korea and Japan with respective values of 271MB/month and 199MB/month expected in 2010, which is two to three times higher than the global average.

In North America where 86 percent of mobile data traffic is currently generated by smartphone users, the ATPU is expected to reach 776MB/month by 2015. Western Europe, on the other hand, will have an ATPU of 736/MB a month in 2015 from under 44MB/month last year, according to Informa Telecoms & Media.

The rapid growth of ATPU in different regions around the world is driven by a number of factors such as the fast migration of subscribers to higher-speed mobile networks, the proliferation of flat rate data plans, and the availability of wide range of smartphones targeting different consumer groups with different lifestyles.

Smartphones are still considered a status symbol in many emerging markets where users largely use mobile service for voice and SMS rather than for accessing mobile data services.

In these markets, ATPU is not going higher than 43MB/month this year and could be as low as 13MB/month in some African countries, the research showed.

Informa Telecoms & Media point to the low penetration of mobile broadband networks, the lack of compelling local content and the proliferation of prepaid subscribers as among the reasons why smartphone ATPU in emerging markets will lag behind.

ATPU is also influenced by OS platforms. Apple’s iPhone will continue to lead the smartphone ATPU because of its high user base of premium users with high ARPUs.

According to Malik Kamal-Saadi, principal analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media, the iPhone is the highest-traffic-generating device followed by Android devices. He added that it’s a lead that iPhone will retain as Android devices will be spread across high-, mid- and low-user segments. ATPU worldwide from iPhone users is estimated at 196MB/month this year.

However, other platforms, mainly Android and Microsoft Windows Phone, will catch up as the gap in terms of user experience is narrowing quite rapidly. Android ATPU is currentIy at 148MB/month and likely to exceed 757MB/month by 2015.