As an iPhone addict I walk around with my iPhone on a regular basis.   I went to New York City for a holiday weekend a few weeks back.  As I walked around Manhattan I noticed that it seemed most everybody had some kind of Smartphone. The interesting thing was that if I had been in Manhattan 5 years ago I would have seen everybody walking around with the phone to their ear.  This time everybody was walking around with their eyes glued to the little screen social networking, using Google Maps, or walking and checking email.

The other thing I noticed was the battery consumption on my phone.  I live in Tucson, Arizona.  As you can imagine it’s a much different place than New York in many ways.  But one of them for sure is the battery life of my iPhone.  In Arizona, my iPhone will go a few days between charges while on stand-by and most of the day if I am out and about using it to look things up, check my email, and even take the occasional call.  It’s kind of old school, but I still actually call people on the phone.

Anyway, while in New York my battery was lasting less than 4 hours.  When I checked the cellular data usage meter on my phone (its under the “about” menu for all the non-iPhone users) it showed my phone was transmitting more than 2 Mbytes every hour and receiving more than 2 Mbytes every hour and this was with it in my pocket, not doing anything.

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With the launch of the iPad earlier this year and the imminent launch of the iPhone 4, we continue to see that consumers just can’t get enough of the capabilities these smart phones and “Internet-ready” devices provide. Rich content over mobile networks is not only here to stay but its growing at astounding rates.  Research released last week from Morgan Stanley projected an inflection point of 2012 when the number of global units of smart phones shipped will surpass desktop PCs and Notebooks. (http://www.morganstanley.com/institutional/techresearch/pdfs/MS_Internet_Trends_060710.pdf) 2012…..not that far off.
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Yesterday Sandvine released its semi-annual Internet report where we shared observations from a cross-section of the world’s leading mobile data providers. Interestingly enough, the key take away was that mobile networks are very similar to fixed line. Sandvine continues to see evidence that mobile data is becoming mainstream phenomena as subscribers rely on their mobile connections to do the same things they do on their home PCs. In fact, voice is consuming an ever smaller percentage of overall mobile network traffic. According to a March report by analyst Chetan Sharma, GigaOM Pro Analyst Network, U.S. data traffic exceeded voice traffic by almost 400,000 GB in 2009 and that ratio is expected to double this year. It’s clear, mobile data usage and revenues are disconnected.

So what does this mean for mobile operators? We believe that as more and more applications are offered on mobile devices, operators are looking to predict usage patterns so they can offer personalized service tiers that increase customer satisfaction, and to build out their networks to match user demand. AT&T recently stated that “5 percent of users account for approximately half of the data traffic on average” so clearly flat-rate billing does not align with subscriber usage (see Fierce Wireless: Mobile data traffic patterns look similar to fixed broadband patterns).

And for subscribers? Hopefully it means more and more applications along with appropriate service tiers that economically keep our lives connected to the Internet, everywhere.

Some of the high-level findings of Sandvine’s report include interesting observations like social networking accounting for up to 9% of total bytes on any given mobile network and YouTube accounting for 10 to 15 percent of total bytes on any given mobile network. To download the full report visit http://www.sandvine.com/news/global_broadband_trends.asp.