Twice a year, I spend a month locked in my office with a case of Diet Coke while I work on Sandvine’s Global Internet Phenomena report.
Today, I’m pleased to announce that I have emerged, and you can now download our 2H 2013 Global Internet Phenomena Report. As usual, the report is jam-packed with insight on the latest broadband trends, based on aggregated and anonymized data from our mobile and fixed service provider customers.
One of my favorite things about writing the report is getting new data from a country or region that we had previously not covered. For this version of the report, I am especially excited because for the first time we were able to shine a light on mobile networks in Africa.
As a whole, Africa is among the most diverse and fastest growing regions in the world, and our data shows just how unique their mobile Internet usage is.
In most regions, Real-Time Entertainment is the traffic category that is the most dominant. This is not the case in Africa however. During peak period, Real-Time Entertainment accounts for only 4.7% of peak downstream traffic. Instead we can crown Web Browsing as the dominant downstream traffic category, accounting for over 44% of total traffic. Communications is not far behind at 27.3%.
In most regions, YouTube is the application responsible for generating the most bandwidth on mobile networks, but in Africa it accounts for just 2.7% of traffic. HTTP traffic is the leading source of traffic at 32.2% and WAP Browsing (typically web browsing on a feature phone) is also a contributor at 5.8%. Africa is also the only region where Opera Mini, a web browser focused on data efficiency, is among the top 25 applications. While BlackBerry has seen a significant decline in developed markets, the devices are incredibly popular in emerging markets such as Africa because of their low cost and data efficiency. BlackBerry smartphones are efficient because all of their data (email, browsing, BBM) is tunneled to a network operations center (NOC), and because of this it is seen as one singular source of traffic accounting for 13.9% of traffic.
It will be very interesting to track how mobile usage in Africa grows and changes over time, and it’s something I’ll be sure to cover in-depth in our 1H2014 report. The full report, along with our regional snapshots that provide an even more in-depth look at traffic in Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Africa, and North America can all be downloaded at sandvine.com.
