Streaming surpassing P2P in clogging mobile networks

Meanwhile, even on congested cells, HTTP streaming was far more evenly distributed among data users and accounted for far less of each individual subscriber’s total data use. Though Gordon cautioned the data is limited—it was gathered from networks serving only 150 million users around the world—and was collected only over a single quarter, it points to the rapid rise of smartphones in the market, many of which support streaming capabilities. In the Americas region, streaming accounted for 23% of all mobile data traffic, second only to Web browsing at 35%, which both can be explained by the relatively higher penetration of smartphones.

Because streaming is more distributed among operator’s customer base, the costs are distributed among millions of subscriptions, rather than a handful. But Gordon said operators shouldn’t become complacent. The alarming pace at which streaming is growing could have a significant impact on operators networks quickly, Gordon said.

“To be honest, I would be much more worried about streaming than peer-to-peer,” Gordon said. “It has a much larger potential impact. Peer-to-peer users are only 5% to 10% of subscribers, but video could be used by 90% to 100%.” As more subscribers start streaming and their average daily consumption of streamed content increases, it could easily become a much bigger source of congestion than P2P. Operators can keep ahead of it through network upgrades and expansion, but they should also look at ways of monetizing streaming as premium service, Gordon said.

Gordon also pointed out that while the P2P wave appears to be subsiding its being replaced with HTTP downloading, which produces the same congestion problems on the network. Rather download large files from another user on P2P network, customers seem to be downloading directly from the Web. HTTP Downloading was the second highest growth application in the second quarter behind streaming. In the Americas they accounted for 16% of application traffic, and in Europe it has already surpassed P2P.