Blog | Sandvine

Next week, Sandvine will release the 2020 Mobile Internet Phenomena Report! This is the 10th year of Sandvine publishing the Phenomena reports, and they are of critical importance to network operators that are struggling to cope with an ever changing mix of traffic - dominated by video, gaming, and social sharing. This year, we are continuing to drill deeper into these areas, and we will have some interesting new things to highlight and contrast regarding mobile behavior with the Global Internet Phenomena Report.

Last year, YouTube was dominant on mobile networks worldwide with over 35% of total downstream traffic. Can it maintain that level of dominance in the face of an increasing push by Facebook Video and TikTok on mobile networks - not to mention the beast that is Instagram?

We also looked at some interesting data in the Global Report that I want to compare - like how much of the mobile internet is taken up by those same six brands (Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflix, and Microsoft) that consume 43% of the overall internet. My instinct tells me that number is even higher....

And what about gaming? We covered the launch (albeit a blip at the time) of Google Stadia, and even saw a few instances of people trying to play cloud gaming on mobile networks (and failing miserably and giving up fairly quickly). Last year Pokemon Go, PUBG, and Fortnite were the leaders on mobile - can they stay the leaders in an increasingly crowded gaming market?

One blog to stay tuned for is a spotlight on mobile networks that behave like fixed line networks. The early use case for 5G is as a fixed line replacement offering by many mobile operators (since 5G mobile handsets are not yet shipping in any volume). We have several interesting case studies that show the behavior and traffic composition on those networks is substantially different - so, if you are building a mobile network to offer services to "fixed" customers, don't use the Mobile Report for guidance, use the Global Report instead! I will go into more detail on this one, as when I was working on the data, I was surprised by some of the results until I dug into the root cause - and this was it.

So, stay tuned over the next two weeks as we share data from the report up until the release, then register for our webinar(s) below to hear about our discoveries!

4 March, 9am - 10am EST

4 March, 9pm - 10pm EST