On a week where it was announced that data traffic surpassed voice traffic on mobile phone networks across the world, The Media Cube wander whether we are all guilty of becoming too socially mobile dependant?
In December 2009, global voice and data traffic reached a combined total of 140,000 terabytes a month, according to Hans Vestburg, Ericsson CEO and president, a massive impression compared with only five years ago.
With social networks continuing to charge up the popularity charts, more users demand the need to access their accounts 24/7. With such a high demand, more than 200 mobile network operators promote Facebook Mobile products across the world, meaning that more than 100 million people regularly use Facebook on their a mobile to interact on-demand.
This can also reveal the marketing potential that mobile phones now possess. With a target audience gathering from a range of demographics, brands are continuously exploiting the popularity to their advantage.
Mobile manufacturers Ericsson, claimed that the rise was identified based on measurements taken from its commercially deployed network infrastructure. Ericsson also said mobile data traffic volumes grew 280% during each of the last two years and further predicted that mobile data traffic will double each year for the next five years.
Hans Vestburg, Ericsson CEO and president, said that this was a ’significant milestone’ that has an impact worldwide, “This is a significant milestone, with some 400m mobile broadband subscriptions now generating more data traffic than the voice traffic from the total 4.6bn mobile subscriptions around the world,” he said.
Do you have a mobile and use Facebook? How much time would you say you spend on the web via your mobile? Drop your comments below, and join the growing discussion of how are mobiles, and even Facebook are making us socially dependant all day, everyday.
I have a mobile with a facebook application, and I would say that I use it about an hour every month. That’s only because we don’t have wireless internet at home, but at school we have. So when I’m home I have to use my computer. I think that if we had wireless internet, I would be more on my mobile, because it is a lot easier.
Posted: June 14, 2010 at 11:06 am;Hi Susanne. It’s interesting to hear you say that you are dependent on a wireless connection. With recent changes to data packages from the likes of O2, actual mobile browsing is coming under increasing pressure to cope. If your mobile plan doesn’t have a data allowance it can be incredibly expensive to continue using data services. With an increasing number of social media applications such as Facebook, Twitter, Four Square etc that use ever larger amounts of data, not having an affordable data allowance can be hard. How has O2’s removal of ‘unlimited’ data affected you or others?
Posted: August 5, 2010 at 9:07 am;