Cisco, the guys who make the infrastructure equipment that delivered all the illegal torrents currently sitting on your hard drive, just published their annual “Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update“. It’s something they like to put out there to freak ISPs and operators out so that they spend more money expanding their network. There are so many statistics in the report that it would take us a solid week to break them all down, but thanks to Google News you can see which angles multiple news organizations took when rehashing Cisco’s data. The stat we want to focus on is something we originally read on Light Reading, which said that during a 21 month period following a “Tier 1 Global Wireless Operator” the amount of network resources the top 1% of users consumed fell from 54% to just 24%. Breaking things down even further by looking at the tables Cisco put in their report, the top 10% of users started out using 83% of the network’s resources, but then that figure dropped to just 54% by the end of that 21 month period.
In other words, the myth of the “data hog” is dying. More people are using more data, and there’s nothing that operators can do to stop that. Sure, operators can put people in tiered data plans that make them scared to consume more, but that doesn’t change a thing in terms of controlling growth. An Android user on an unlimited plan uses up 909 MB a month on average versus 676 MB a month for one on a tiered plan; does 233 MB really make that much of a difference in the grand scheme of things? No, not really.
While it’s a bit premature to ask for unlimited data to come back, we do think it’s time operators started offering pricing tiers that actually make sense. Forget data buckets, just give everyone speed caps. If it works for fixed line operators, why can’t it work for wireless?