2020 Mobile Internet Phenomena Report: more than 65 percent is Video

Source: Sandvine

In September, I blogged about the 2019 Global Internet Phenomena Report which revealed that video was 60% of the overall downstream traffic on the internet. The 2020 Mobile Internet Phenomena Report [Sandvine] shows that mobile video downstream traffic accounts for more than 65%; much more than any other application category as shown in the figure on the right, followed by social networking traffic and messaging. One year ago (see my blog post from Feb 2019), this was around 42% which means an increase of 23 percentage points. Thus, video growth is much higher for mobile networks than in general.

From the global mobile application traffic share, YouTube still maintains its number one position with more than 27% downstream traffic (vs. 37% in 2019) followed by Facebook Video, Instagram, Facebook, and Netflix "only" in 5th position (but numbers almost doubled compared to 2019).

The report also includes a spotlight regarding 5G and fixed mobile replacement (i.e., home boxes with connection to the mobile internet). Fixed-mobile network traffic share is led by Netflix with more than 25% followed by YouTube, Hulu, Disney+, and Amazon Prime -- all HTTP adaptive streaming services with together more than 58% of the traffic share. However, it seems that early 5G networks will mainly act as fixed-line replacements, similar to 4G networks in Europe due to unlimited data plans.

Another spotlight is related to Quality of Experience (QoE) and here I found something interesting, namely: "video is actually the simplest application to deliver good QoE to – give it a good downstream throughput, and it generally works fine. Keep the buffers on the device full, and the user won’t see any momentary network congestion or delay". I'd like to read your comments on this... 😎

Overall, video growth for mobile is much higher than for fixed networks and now mobile networks have surpassed fixed networks and I am wondering whether this growth will continue in the years to come. Remember, forecasts predict video will account for like 80% within the next few years...