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4G Weekly Digest October 28th, 2009 - Volume 5, Issue 10

Editor's Foreword
By Adlane Fellah, CEO and Founder

Another week full of notable events in the 4G industry: Wichorus was acquired by Tellabs in what looks like the rush to the packet core gold mine; Nokia is suing Apple for patent infringement (Robert Syputa provides his perspective below in an extensive article capitalizing on his series of reports on IPR); and US service provider Verizon trails AT&T in Q3 net adds, thanks to fierce competition from AT&T and the iPhone 3GS.

Maybe of less note but still rather interesting is the latest report on traffic patterns by Sandvine. Once again, a deep packet inspection company is feeding the market with hard data following the report by Cisco and Allot Communications. I would personally like to see the kind of data contained in the report coming from the GSMA to better understand what applications are driving the mobile Internet growth – perhaps that is in the works, as numerous mobile operators consider this data too sensitive to share.

In turn, “The 2009 Global Broadband Phenomena Study” consisted of analyzing data from more than 20 cable modem and digital subscriber line (DSL) broadband service providers’ networks, totaling 24 million subscribers in various regions.

In any case, what we learn from Sandvine confirms what we suspected: a small group of data-hungry users take up more than their share of bandwidth consumption. The research indicates that over an average month the top one percent of subscribers account for 25 percent of total Internet traffic, showing a vast difference between the data needs of most network users and the consumption kings.

Other notable findings include:

Broad-based adoption of on-demand applications drives peak network utilization globally. Peak-time usage is only slightly influenced by the top network users as measured over the previous month, suggesting that usage management and congestion management are distinct objectives.
Mature broadband markets have embraced on-demand entertainment applications, while emerging markets still rely on peer-to-peer as the primary source of content.
In 2009, networks are transporting almost 56% more data per subscriber to and from storage and back-up services than in 2008, led by one-click download services like Rapidshare and MegaUpload, and continuing a trend that first came to prominence last year.
Traffic to and from gaming consoles increased by more than 50% per subscriber, demonstrating not only the popularity of online gaming, but also the growing use of game consoles as sources of “traditional” entertainment such as movies and TV shows.
BitTorrent has emerged as by far the leading peer-to-peer file-sharing network both in terms of number of users and total bytes worldwide, although there are still regional variations.
At a global level, P2P file sharing declined by 25 percent as a share of total traffic, to account for just over 20 percent of total bytes. However, the decline is not consistent in every region: North America experienced a 20 percent relative decline, while the Caribbean and Latin America actually experienced an increase of more than 30 percent.

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Source: Sandvine 2009 Global Broadband Phenomena

Enjoy!

Adlane Fellah
Maravedis CEO & Founder