Mobile broadband on growth track

Growth in mobile broadband in MEA will far outpace that of fixed broadband, causing subscriptions to multiply more than 16 times to 430.7 million by end-2015 from 25.39 million in 2010, according to Informa Telecoms and Media. The number of fixed broadband subscriptions at the end of last year stood at 10.6 million and will rise to 25.91 million by end of 2015. This year around 38.35 million subscriptions are expected to be on mobile broadband compared to 13.14 million on fixed broadband. Meanwhile, the number of mobile subscriptions in the Middle East and Africa will reach almost 1.26 billion by the end of 2015, up from 951 million by the end of 2011. Article continues below But the high incidence of multiple-SIM use, which is typical in the Middle East and Africa, means that the number of unique users is markedly lower than the number of subscriptions, something that will continue to be the case in the coming years. Many mobile subscribers have several SIM cards at any one time so that they can take advantage of particular promotions and on-net tariffs, and because the quality and extent of network coverage offered by different operators might vary. Unique subscribers "The rate of SIM-penetration in the Middle East and Africa [MEA] will rise to 83 per cent at the end of 2015, up from 60 per cent at the end of 2010. However, the unique-user penetration will be more modest, reaching 53 per cent at the end of 2015, up from 46 per cent at the end of 2010," Matthew Reed, senior analyst, Informa Telecoms & Media, said. There will be 806 million unique mobile subscribers in the Middle East and Africa at the end of 2015, up from 623.6 million at the end of 2010. The level of growth in the region's mobile market will slow over the coming few years as it becomes more mature. There will be 48 million net new mobile subscriptions in the Middle East and Africa in 2015, down from 117.8 million net additions in 2010. The mobile market in the Middle East and Africa will remain overwhelmingly prepaid, with Pre-paid connections accounting for 90.72 per cent of mobile subscriptions in the region by the end of 2015, a slight rise on 90.3 per cent at the end of 2010. Informa forecasts that there will be approaching 66 million portable, or mobile broadband, subscriptions in the Middle East and Africa by the end of 2015, accounting for 5.2 per cent of all mobile subscriptions in the region. Africa in limelight That is a substantial rise from just under 11 million portable subscriptions in the Middle East and Africa at the end of 2010, which represented just 1.3 per cent of regional mobile subscriptions. Africa is forecast to continue to be more strongly prepaid than the Middle East. Prepaid connections will account for 94.5 per cent of mobile subscriptions in Africa, compared with 83.1 per cent in the Middle East at the end of 2015. The number of fixed-internet users in the MEA will nearly double over the next five years to reach 220 million users, while the amount of traffic they generate will increase tenfold to 20,300 petabtyes or 20.3 trillion megabytes. Gaining popularity: Focus on ONline storage Recent years have seen the telecom industry littered with claims that users of high bandwidth content will ‘break the Internet', and that bandwidth hogs using peer-to-peer will make it impossible for operators to run broadband networks profitably. Some of the more contentious web issues today — net neutrality, the relationships between service and network providers, and that between access and backbone provides — are really centred on one key question. How much bandwidth are people using today? In 2010, online video generated more traffic than peer-to-peer file sharing for the first time ever. Video will account for half of the traffic by 2014. Majority of video streams today are delivered at SD quality to the PC. Both HD, and delivery to the TV, will grow significantly by 2015, which means that even if users watched no more videos in 2015 than they did in 2010, traffic will still grow significantly. By 2015, HD video will account for more traffic than SD video, while video to the TV will take 10 per cent of total traffic. The fastest growing service, apart from video, will be online storage. It will grow in popularity as more users see the value in storing their content in the cloud, rather than on an in-home device, which is susceptible to failure. Online storage will be natural benefactor from the increase in bandwidth as the usefulness of any online storage service is directly proportional to how fast a user's internet connection is. And, as well people using services for ‘legitimate' users, online storage will continue to be a popular way for users to upload and download copyrighted content too.