Category: Trends

Middle East Mobile Broadband Traffic Analytics: Summer Traffic Survey

September 17th, 2012 by Cam Cullen
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    The Middle East is forecast to have a very high growth rate over the next few years for broadband networks, especially in the mobile area. Portio Research reports that Egypt, Oman and Sudan are the Top 3 fastest growing mobile markets worldwide based on their Worldwide Mobile Industry Handbook 2011-2016. IDC reports that the number of mobile subscribers in the Middle East will approach 271M by the end of 2012 (report here) with mobile penetration topping 100% in 2012. Informa released a report on the regional share for mobile subscribers, with Iran and Saudi Arabia leading the way for the region.

    Procera has been working with a number of mobile operators in the Middle East, and our findings are that the usage patterns for Middle Eastern mobile operators is similar to other regions, but that the number of “power users” is much lower – which usually translates to a lower number of smartphones and mobile broadband dongles. The statistics below represent an aggregation of that data across specific operators that Procera is working with. We believe strongly that “All network trends are local”, and detailed analytics on YOUR network are what help network operators build profitable service models, and encourage operators to gain insight into their subscriber’s behavior before creating new services.

    However, many trends in the Middle East have similar traffic distributions as other regions. For example, the domains visited on Middle Eastern mobile networks are very similar to what you might see on mobile networks around the world. The chart below shows the top sites visited over the past two months on the mobile network, from a traffic as well as total number of connections:

    It is not a surprise that Facebook, Google (including local versions of Google), and several CDNs (Amazon and Akamai) lead the way in total traffic volume – which shows that content really is king in the Middle East as well as the rest of the world. From a connections point of view, Facebook is still the number one by far, with Zynga making an appearance as a social gaming powerhouse, and Google maintaining a strong position due to searches and advertising.

    From an application point of view, Streaming Video is at the top of the heap from an overall bandwidth usage as well for different types of applications used by mobile subscribers.

    Drilling down into specific applications, Streaming Media applications again take top honors, but as seen by Facebook’s position in the website table, HTTP browsing is not far behind.

    Drilling down into Streaming Video specifically, Flash Video (for non-IOS phones) and HTTP Media Streaming (used primarily by IOS) are the top applications, which is consistent with other regions that do not have Netflix or similar video streaming services..

    The Middle East is a rapidly growing mobile data market, and many operators are reporting mobile data traffic growth in excess of 100% a year (even with penetration passing 100%!). The introduction of LTE into many countries will only increase that growth, and the ability of the mobile operators to create service plans targeted to consumer application and content trends will increase their revenue AND enhance subscriber satisfaction.

    North American Broadband Trend: The Rise of Guild Wars 2

    August 28th, 2012 by Cam Cullen
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      A new game is taking North American broadband networks by storm – before it even launches. Guild Wars 2, a MMO that wants to take on World of Warcraft and other popular MMOs on the PC, officially ships today for PC players everywhere. However, it is already having an effect on broadband networks in North America. The game has been in beta for some time, and over the past two weeks, has steadily climbed the traffic charts to be one of the top domains across North America in terms of overall traffic – passing even YouTube.com and Facebook.com on some days.

       

      The chart above shows the growth of traffic to the arenanetworks.com domain over the past three weeks. As you can see, there are spikes on the weekends, but the traffic over the past week has really jumped as players start to take full advantage of the game. With the full launch being today, we expect the traffic volumes to go up even higher, maybe even touching a few % of overall traffic (right now the level is less than 1%, but on some networks it is threatening to reach 1%). It has even exceeded on many of these networks the volume of traffic destined to playstation.net, which is always an active gaming destination.

       

      Who said PC gaming was dead?

      London 2012 Summer Olympics Broadband Analytics: Streaming Explodes

      July 31st, 2012 by Cam Cullen
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        After a slow start on Friday and Saturday, Sunday was the day that the Olympics streaming became a force to be reckoned with.

        1. In the US, several networks peaked as high as 34% of overall bandwidth and increased in volume by over 100% over the initial two days of events. Many reports detailed how people were watching one event on TV and streaming other events on PCs and tablets. Since we did not see a huge rise in the percentage of subscribers participating in the streaming events, this translates into longer streaming sessions and more sessions for each subscriber. With the NBC delaying some of the more high profile events until primetime (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/sports/olympics/nbc-olympics-delay-and-streaming-bring-complaints-on-twitter.html?partner=rss&emc=rss), streaming during these events will continue to be popular. With the results available on Twitter (the news source of choice for most high tech consumers today), Olympics viewers risk knowing the results before the broadcast, and want to see the events live.

        2. In the UK, BBC iPlayer, after a slow start over the weekend, hit full stride during the GB Olympic football team match. Streaming was up over 100% over normal Sunday levels, across all platforms (IOS, Android, PC, Mac), with the Olympic streaming specifically accounting for half the traffic (which conveniently accounts for the difference from normal traffic!). The IOS platform was the most popular platform, with a 10x usage lead over Android, heavily leveraging the latest iPad platform. Since the subscribers being monitored on this mobile network are native GB residents, it is likely that this pattern will continue throughout the games during events of great interest to the British fans. This has been confirmed by BBC themselves (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/jul/30/olympics-opening-ceremony-views-iplayer), claiming that Sunday was a record day for iPlayer.

        3. Netflix streaming was unchanged from normal in Canada, but was down 25% in the US on Sunday from normal levels on some networks. This matches expectations, as the US is much more involved in the Olympics than Canada, and with the peak levels that we mentioned earlier for Olympics streaming, something had to give, and in this case it was Netflix. Netflix even blamed the Olympics for anticipated slower growth this quarter (http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Netflix-Blames-Olympics-For-Slowing-Growth-120525). (Note: This is what was observed on Procera’s network deployments around North America).

        4. Studying the usage patterns of different devices on the mobile networks, the iPhone 4 reigns as the king of usage. The average iPhone 4 user consumed more than 2x the bandwidth of an iPhone 4s user, and 3x the bandwidth of the leading Android phones (Samsung Galaxy models). The bandwidth consumption is shown in Figure 1a to the right. These numbers should change during the week as mobile devices become a primary source of Olympic updates.

        		 Image 1a: Top Mobile Phone Model Comparision