Solved: Restatement on the US/ North American mobile traffic data

shjain · ‎06-10-2016

We have been consistently following the Cisco Mobile VNI data provided by you on annual basis.

However, this year we have found a massive downgrade of US mobile data usage for 2014 in the 2015 actual data edition. The mobile data usage for 2014 for US has been restated to c323PB per month ( from c530 PB per month). The number c323PB per month we have calculated using the 2015 actual data and the growth rate provided by you on the website.

We will be grateful if you can let us know the reason for such a big downgrade - is it down to some change in methodology or pure restatement of actuals. Also it will be great if you can provide us with an excel consisting of historical yearly data for all the countries.

Hoping for a quick response.

Thanks.

shjain · ‎06-10-2016

Answer:

As part of this year’s mobile forecast update, we did have a downward revision of U.S. mobile data traffic volumes. We initially addressed this adjustment publicly on the day the forecast update was released through a blog we helped to develop with Dr. Pepper (please see: 2016 Cisco Mobile VNI: Reporting on the Data). As part of our due diligence, we regularly review our growth rates and traffic volumes with a few standards/regulatory bodies (including CTIA). In an effort to align our projections (to some degree) with this important organization, we reviewed some of our past assumptions and determined that a revision was in order. We have responded to a number of industry analysts (including McKinsey) regarding our revised U.S. figures as follows:

________________________________________

The adjustment reflected in our report does not change the forecast growth curve much at all. The 2015 growth (year on year) is forecast at 56%. The fundamental trend lines hold. There’s more devices and more video consumed over faster networks, which will continue to transform the world around us.

We are seeing that mobile operators investing in 4G/LTE enhancements (to provide greater coverage and better reliability), something they would not be doing if they thought demand was flat or growing only slowly and they could just use what they have. Over the 2015-2020 forecast period, we see US mobile data traffic growing at a very healthy 42% CAGR and busy-hour traffic growing even faster at 45% CAGR, which makes the additional point that you can’t just build or manage for “average” traffic. This is mostly just the natural consequence of larger volumes and market maturity. It was not a significant change in our expectations for the US. Without the lower growth in 2014, it might have been in the neighborhood of 43-44% instead, so we did temper it a bit, but not a significant amount.

Finally, we are seeing that U.S. operators in particular are increasingly curbing demand with data caps that are not keeping pace with consumer behavior, which is why Wi-Fi offload is already 62% of traffic from mobile (SIM enabled) devices and forecast to grow to 69% by 2020 (in the U.S.). In some other global markets within the Central & Eastern Europe and Asia Pacific regions for example, data caps have been raised to accommodate increased mobile usage profiles.

Thanks,

Thomas Barnett

Cisco VNI Team

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shjain · ‎06-10-2016

Answer:

As part of this year’s mobile forecast update, we did have a downward revision of U.S. mobile data traffic volumes. We initially addressed this adjustment publicly on the day the forecast update was released through a blog we helped to develop with Dr. Pepper (please see: 2016 Cisco Mobile VNI: Reporting on the Data). As part of our due diligence, we regularly review our growth rates and traffic volumes with a few standards/regulatory bodies (including CTIA). In an effort to align our projections (to some degree) with this important organization, we reviewed some of our past assumptions and determined that a revision was in order. We have responded to a number of industry analysts (including McKinsey) regarding our revised U.S. figures as follows:

________________________________________

The adjustment reflected in our report does not change the forecast growth curve much at all. The 2015 growth (year on year) is forecast at 56%. The fundamental trend lines hold. There’s more devices and more video consumed over faster networks, which will continue to transform the world around us.

We are seeing that mobile operators investing in 4G/LTE enhancements (to provide greater coverage and better reliability), something they would not be doing if they thought demand was flat or growing only slowly and they could just use what they have. Over the 2015-2020 forecast period, we see US mobile data traffic growing at a very healthy 42% CAGR and busy-hour traffic growing even faster at 45% CAGR, which makes the additional point that you can’t just build or manage for “average” traffic. This is mostly just the natural consequence of larger volumes and market maturity. It was not a significant change in our expectations for the US. Without the lower growth in 2014, it might have been in the neighborhood of 43-44% instead, so we did temper it a bit, but not a significant amount.

Finally, we are seeing that U.S. operators in particular are increasingly curbing demand with data caps that are not keeping pace with consumer behavior, which is why Wi-Fi offload is already 62% of traffic from mobile (SIM enabled) devices and forecast to grow to 69% by 2020 (in the U.S.). In some other global markets within the Central & Eastern Europe and Asia Pacific regions for example, data caps have been raised to accommodate increased mobile usage profiles.

Thanks,

Thomas Barnett

Cisco VNI Team