David Burnstein's List: Mobile Broadband

Below, I've charted the last 10 years' worth of Verizon's voice and data service revenues. Overall service revenue has more than tripled, but data is still only about 44% of Verizon Wireless's service revenue.

To sum up the conclusion of the report: caps do not help ensure quality of service, as operators claim. The problem is caps are not employed directly to limit congestion, but at best indirectly. Congestion occurs at peak times, while caps are calculated over a full month. To compare it with a similar situation: traffic jams cannot be eliminated by setting a maximum number of kilometers per month for each driver. Using the car less during peak hours is simply not possible, as this is mainly needed for home-work travel. If drivers do take the car out less, it will mainly related to off-peak journeys.

In an interview with Fierce Wireless, Mike Haberman, vice president of network engineering for Verizon Wireless, has confirmed that almost 50% of its data transmissions now travel over its Long Term Evolution (LTE) network. The figure is up significantly from October 2012, when the company indicated that around 35% of its data load was carried over its 4G network. Further, the cellco said that it expects to witness a seven-fold overall increase in data traffic during the next three years. Haberman noted that Verizon’s LTE network now covers around 89% of its legacy 2G/3G network footprint.

Worldwide mobile data traffic doubled over the past year and is expected to continue growing at a similar rate due to expanding smartphone sales and video traffic, telecom equipment maker Ericsson said in research released today.

Video accounts for 50 percent of Verizon Wireless' (NYSE:VZ) network traffic today and by 2017 the carrier estimates video will make up two-thirds of all traffic over the network. Speaking at the National Association of Broadcasters conference here yesterday, Verizon Communications CEO Lowell McAdam said that the company's investment in its LTE network is what is making the delivery of that video possible. "With 3G you have video clips but there is buffering. With 4G you can stream video," he said.

Another research firm, this time the NPD Group, has predicted that shipments of smartphones will overtake those of basic and feature phones for the first time this year, as adoption of smartphones accelerates.
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NPD's report echoes one from March from research firm IDC, which estimated that vendors will ship 918.6 million smartphones this year, or 50.1 percent of the total mobile phone shipments worldwide. NPD's shipment and market share estimates are slightly higher but roughly in line with that assessment. Smartphones accounted for more than half of all mobile phones shipped during the first quarter of 2013, eclipsing feature phones for the first time, according to an IDC report from late April.

At an SK Telecom event in Seoul today, company representatives took the wraps off the world’s first consumer LTE-Advanced network, and it is unbelievably fast. The new standard is the successor to current-generation LTE technology, supporting much higher data transmission speeds — we saw downloads topping out at 102Mbps. For comparison, that’s more than 10 times faster than the average home broadband speed in the US. SK Telecom says that the network supports even faster speeds up to a theoretical maximum of 150Mbps down and 37.5Mbps up, and it's providing the new service to customers without increasing charges. It's worth noting that other carriers have rolled out LTE-Advanced networking hardware before, but so far there haven't been any phones that take advantage of the new speeds.