This year Mobility ReportEricsson has significantly reduced demand for mobile data, reflecting a noticeable slowdown in the growth rate of mobile data. Gone are the days when data growth was 100% or even 50% each year. Demand for mobile gigabytes has slowed to around 22% in 2023, according to our benchmarking. By 2030, our modeling of existing applications leads to growth rates in the range of 15-16%.
This is a recipe for very slow investment in the mobile industry and for everyone to lose their jobs.
Some argue that this is a human constraint: we can only watch four hours of video per day on our phones… After all, we only have 24 hours, so we can’t watch videos all the time. There is some truth in this concept, which leads to ever-lower growth figures.
Dark. Sad. Boring. The 5G winter has been cold so far. But…
New apps are starting to bloom like flowers in spring. The most exciting new app is the expansion of “voice assistants” like Siri and Google Assistant to add AI assistant capabilities. Siri’s AI upgrade is expected to be unveiled next month at our favorite Silicon Valley holiday: Apple’s September product launch.
Most people focus on the computational needs of AI. After all, ChatGPT and other Gen-AI services involve text or images. The computational workload can be enormous, but the data sent over the mobile network is in many cases just text. So far, AI has not affected the 5G network much. That is about to change.
An AI assistant will monitor your “screen” on your smartphone, periodically taking a screenshot as it navigates a task. Ask your assistant to book a trip to San Diego. It will click the right buttons, enter your information and credit card details, find a hotel, rent the car, and so on. Every drop-down menu and data entry field must be monitored, just like humans normally do. With enough complexity, it starts to look like an uplink video feed with lots of data.
The encouraging aspect of this app is that 660 million people use Siri, and a similar number use Google or Amazon assistants. Unlike AR/VR and other promising apps, there is a market here with existing users. These users won’t even realize they are loading a new app… it will simply be the latest version of their familiar “assistant.”
We have just published a high level analysis AI assistants and other applications will drive increased mobile uplink traffic. Operators are happy with their downlink capacity with their mid-band 5G networks, but they could be caught off guard by the surge in AI uplink traffic, driving demand far beyond capacity. Our modeling takes into account new frequency bands, FWA, small cells and millimeter waves, and we have validated our findings with several major operators.
Does this mean a further increase in investments in mobile infrastructure? We have some thoughts on this and will be connecting the dots over the next four months. We see this trend as an opportunity for operators to justify some premium rate plans and add small cells and new spectrum in urban hotspots. Stay tuned for more articles on this topic.
Joe Madden is a principal analyst at Mobile Experts, a network of market and technology experts who analyze wireless markets.
Industry Voices editorials are opinion pieces written by industry experts or analysts invited to contribute by the Fierce team. They do not represent the views of Fierce.
