US Mobile Data Traffic Usage Exceeds Voice 71
MojoKid writes "A report just released states that total mobile data traffic topped mobile voice traffic in the United States last year, for the first time. In fact, globally, data traffic topped voice traffic on a monthly basis last year, and the total traffic across the world exceeded an exabyte for the first time in 2009. Apparently, North America and Western Europe's mobile data markets are growing so rapidly they each should exceed an exabyte sometime in 2010. Interestingly, the nations with the largest data service revenues were: the US, Japan, China, the UK, Italy, Germany, France, Australia, Spain and Korea, respectively."
Which is why (Score:1)
Your cell bill is going to keep going up, whilst QoS declines...
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Because of contention for the airwaves or because of the backhaul?
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It's the same lie as with fixed broadband. The (mobile/fixed) operators have limited bandwidth, which is very costly to upgrade, and yet they want to drive increasing revenue through new applications. To put it simply, they don't want you actually using all the services you purchased to the full...for example:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=833011 [macrumors.com]
I love the part where the AT&T drone says "we have to educate our [power] users"; translated as "shit, they're actually using the bandwidth they
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In terms of data size, a 10-minute voice-only phone conversation is absolutely miniscule compared to even a single page load of even a mobile-friendly web site
That can't be true. Loading yahoo.com (by no means a lean page) pulls in about 800kb of data. Voice-specific codecs tend to get about 15kbps, so a 10-minute one-sided conversation weighs in at about 9Mb.
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You're thinking of late-1990s voice codecs. More recent codecs, along with improved link-level compression, have reduced it down to 1.5 to 2.0 Kbps, with no perceptible loss in quality.
You've still only reduced the codec bitrate by a factor of ten, resulting in 900 kb. That makes a 10 minute conversation not absolutely miniscule compared to a page load.
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On your next call, notice the lengths of dead air on both sides. Or, maybe you've already noticed the cuts to dead silence on calls through poorly-configured VoIP trunks.
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Re:Voice data is relatively small... (Score:5, Insightful)
We've gone from 'So clear you can hear a pin drop' to "CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?!"
'Loss in quality' indeed.
Help me here..1.5 to 2.0 Kbps (Score:1)
OK, I am not any sort of audio expert or anything, but this range of 1.5 to 2.0 Kbps seems a scosh low. If not, why (and there is my question) is that the lowest you see for audio (talk) netstreams (like at shoutcast [shoutcast.com]) nowadays is 16kbps with rarely an 8 out there. And tons of them run at 24 kbps (and I am paying attention to b or B, and man I wish this "industry" would pick one and stick to it) and above. Why aren't we seeing them run much lower, so they can push more streams? What's the difference, where's
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Doesn't Shoutcast use MP3? That's certainly not optimized for low-bitrate voice.
Probably (Score:1)
MP3 or whatnot. Like I said, not an audio expert, but dang if I can ever remember listening to any stream at less than 8kbps. I am just wondering where these ultra low rate but high quality streams are (outside of the phone calls). Seems like a great way to save on hosting and streaming costs for internet talk radio stuff.
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If it is moving we use b (data-stream). If it is sitting there we use B(storage/ram). So there is a system. And yes, it is stupid and arbitrary.
Well, hey, thanks! (Score:1)
I never noticed that before! At least now it makes *some* sense to me.
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Re:Voice data is relatively small... (Score:5, Interesting)
Ok, first off, loading Yahoo takes about 900 kilobytes (kB), not kilobits (kb).
Your 10minute conversation at 15kbps works out to 9 Mb, which is only 1.125MB.
And in reality cell phone codecs only take even close to 15kbps when they're running at full quality (and cell carriers being what they are, it's my understanding that they almost always skimp on that quality by at least half).
Wikipedia says AMR (the codec used in GSM and UMTS) varies between 12.2kbps and 1.8kbps.
Even the full 12.2kbps works out to 915KB for a 10minute conversation, the 1.8kbps rate only uses 135KB.
Of course, I think those are single channel rates, and you'll normally send as well as receive and thus double the data transmitted.
Overall I wouldn't call the voice call's relative data size minuscule, but it could easily wind up being less than a large-ish page load requires.
But in this case, it might be more appropriate to compare bandwidth needs. And in that measure the voice call really could be minuscule in comparison, since it's load is spread out over minutes instead of seconds.
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That is what I was hoping to see in this article. Makes no mention of how they define voice, since depending on the codec you could be 2.5 kb/s (LPC10, but you sound very robotic so very unlikely), GSM (13 kb/s), (u|a)law (64 kb/s). (And this is limiting. If you were using a wideband codec, that could be even higher)
But lets see, 10 minutes of voice (remember, these are one way bandwidths)
GSM (13 kb/s) * 600 seconds (10 minutes) = 7800 kb = 975 kB.
(u|a)law (64 kb/s) * 600 seconds = 38400 kb = 4800 kB. (Unl
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In the U.S., Verizon charges something like $0.05 per MB for overages on it's mobile broadband plans, or $50 per GB. It used to be somewhere north of $200 per GB so at least it's improved, but i have to wonder how much of their capacity goes unused even while they charge people for transferring what is a relatively small amount of data.
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> but i have to wonder how much of their capacity goes unused even while they charge people
Obviously, just as much as they need to survive during the peak usage periods, or they would lower the price slightly and introduce new features to waste more MBs. Their purpose is to fool you into throwing money at them without wasting their time handling porn or coverage complaints, after all, not to leave your money in your investments (or pockets, at least).
Duh! (Score:1)
When I use voice-over-IP on my Interweb-enabled tubified G4 phone of course the voice traffic goes down!
its all data, lets go there finally (Score:1)
I want the cell companies to drop this absurd notion of selling minutes, and provide high quality data service only - and a "DNS"-like service and effective filtering so people can find me and the programs (including VIOP) that I choose to run on my mobile device.
We're *almost* there, but not yet. Accessing your mobile device via a phone number still works much, much better than just data plans, and SIP sorcery (to get a number for voip) isn't simple at all.
VoIP? (Score:3, Interesting)
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"No I can't understand you you sound like you have shit in your mouth. Why don't you send that to me in an email?"
I despise voice communications of all types.
So would I, if everyone I spoke to told me that. But then at that point, I wouldn't be blaming the communications medium....
Interestingly? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't find this all that interesting, since this pretty much a list of the world's largest economies in descending order. I'd be much more interested in per subscriber data.
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The main reason Japan has smaller revenue is that it has a smaller population. It does however have more cellphones per head of population than the US. The US is about mid table in the world rankings for cellphones per head of population.
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Question is, how big part of all those GDP numbers out there is composed out of imaginary money...
All fiat money is imaginary (Score:2)
how big part of all those GDP numbers out there is composed out of imaginary money
Banks use fractional reserve lending to create money. All fiat money is imaginary.
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Money is just paper backed by the trust that it is worth the goods and services you exchange it for. All money is imaginary.
Prior to the 1970s, U.S. money was backed by the trust that it was worth a legally defined amount of a specific good, namely gold. But since the U.S. abandoned the gold standard, there hasn't been such a law to trust.
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And why exactly does gold have value?
As I understand it, the exchange value of gold developed from its use value in jewelry. Since then, it has developed another use value in connector plating.
But is aesthetics imaginary? (Score:2)
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Japan is larger than the US?
You actually think that?
You're[sic] must be an idiot, right?
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In terms of total GDP, yes. Only the EU is bigger than the US.
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Highlighted the word that made it statistically crap. Prices vary madly between these countries. And as others have mentioned most japanese people use wifi, likely south korea (I assume they didn't mean north here
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Verizon doesn't restrict video streaming and VoIP even on their existing 3G network, but the amount of transfer is quite limited. I've got a Mi-Fi with a 10GB plan but i know if i were to use it for netflix i'd eat through that quickly.
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Torrents would really only be an issue in dense urban areas. Especially in the boondocks, spectrum scarcity shouldn't be an issue.
Capacity of a wireless network depends on subscribers per tower. Urban areas have more people, but they also have more towers.
More data than talk? (Score:4, Funny)
Holy crap that's a lot (Score:5, Interesting)
Our mobile data demands last year were 1 Exabyte - Which is roughly the equivalent of 1/5 the words ever spoken by humans.
No wonder everyone feels crazy. Nothing in evolution prepared us for this much information about anything/everything/everybody all the time. I mean, it's great, it's fantastic, we now essentially carry a device that not only can communicate on several different levels with nearly anyone on the planet anywhere anytime, but it's also a repository of most human knowledge and on their way of becoming capable of nearly everything (Voice, then text, then cameras, mp3, web, navigation, apps then?). True, the data and communication links aren't in your pocket, and it's far from complete. But that's a lot of information. And it's all nearly instantaneous. Now we get frustrated not only if we can't get the information, but if we just can't get it fast enough. 5 seconds of "connecting..." is enough to get us mad sometimes. Never mind that 15-20 years ago it would have involved a trip to a library or several libraries, phone calls, or maybe taking a trip and talking to locals, and take days, hours, or months to find the info we're looking for, half a minute waiting can get us angry, we need to hear what kind of music they play at specific coffeehouses in Prague right now, dammit, we're trying to plan a trip here.
ADD isn't a disorder in this context, it's a result. It gets hard to concentrate for a while nearly everything can be looked up in seconds, nearly every desire that starts "I want to see...", "I want to hear...", "I want to tell..." or "I want to know..." can be instantly fulfilled. If it's not instantly gratified, it's quickly forgotten, and another desire takes it's place, even if it's just been seconds.
All opinion, and I'm not arguing that ADD isn't a disease, just that our technological environment has a lot to do with it.
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You are overstating things more than a little bit. Something like 1/2 of people do not have any regular access to portable communications, and many of the rest of us find current pricing quite unattractive, so we are limited to communicating over voice within a more limited region.
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>Nothing in evolution prepared us for this much information about anything/everything/everybody all the time.
Evolution doesnt prepare us for much. Fighting, fucking, and the basics. The rest is learning and culture. Today's world is just as weird as the world 500+ years ago (agrarian society) and there hasn't been a significant change in the genome. In the world 500 years ago ADD would have been undetectable. No one would know you couldn't sit down and focus on a book for very long as you weren't expec
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15 years ago, would be 1995 - there were search engines back then. Mainly gopher, and Windows 95 did come with Internet Explorer. You would find the file you were looking for by running a gopher search on a keyword - that would list the ftp site you wanted, and then you would send an E-mail to have the file uuencoded to you, or you could download it directly. My workplace had a 64K ISDN line to the nearest university, whose own internet access was referred to "as reliable a wet piece of string".
20 years ago
4G (Score:3, Interesting)
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Or, more lucratively, bill by the TXT.
(aka, "What do you mean these 160 bytes cost 4000x more than other bytes?")
You know what they say... (Score:1)
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On a personal level (Score:2)
My data traffic ( dedicated to direct communication between humans, not just idle data use like downloads or forum posts ) exceeded 'voice' communication decades ago.
We need net neutral wireless now (Score:2)
And we're quite a long way from that.
Australia (Score:2)
the nations with the largest data service revenues were: the US, Japan, China, the UK, Italy, Germany, France, Australia, Spain and Korea, respectively."
I'm not surprised. Optus et al will charge you 55c / KB if you exceed your allotted data, and many plans don't include any. The more economical options are 300 MB for $10 (Virgin) or 1 GB for $20 (ThinkMobile), but they're rather difficult to find, so it's no surprise that they're collecting so much revenue from this.
On the plus side, at least we're allowed to tether.