LTE Advanced: 3GPP Solution for IMT-Advanced

1.5 Traffic Growth

The data volumes in mobile networks have increased considerably during the last few years and the growth is expected to continue. The traffic growth since 2007 and the expected growth until 2015 are illustrated in Figure 1.5. The graph shows the total global mobile network data volume in Exabytes; that is, millions of Terabytes. The traffic is split into voice traffic and data traffic from laptops, tablets and smartphones. The data traffic exceeded the voice traffic during 2009 in terms of carried bytes. The initial data growth was driven by the laptop modems; see an example in Figure 1.6. It is also expected that the LTE-Advanced capabilities, like higher data rates, are first introduced for the laptop modems. The relatively fastest growth from 2012 to 2015 is expected to come from smartphones. The smartphones make nearly half of the traffic by 2015. The total traffic by 2015 will be approximately 40 times more than the traffic 2007. The share of voice traffic is expected to shrink to less than 5% by 2015. Some of the advanced markets already have the total traffic 50 times more than the voice traffic; that means voice is less than 2% of total traffic.

Figure 1.5 Expected traffic growth (Nokia Siemens Network estimate 2011).

Figure 1.6 Example of a 100 Mbps USB modem – Nokia Siemens Networks 7210.

It is not only the data volume that is growing in the networks ...