Allot Communications reported that mobile data bandwidth usage increased by 68 percent during the first half of 2010. This is due to users streaming videos and checking social netowrking sites on their mobile phones.
According to its MobileTrends Global Mobile Broadband Traffic Report, video streaming applications continue to dominate the global mobile bandwidth scene and remain the largest consumer of bandwidth with a 35 percent share.  Web browsing had a 29 percent share in mobile data usage while P2P and HTTP download represented 31 percent of global mobile bandwidth.

In addition, video streaming is the single largest growing application type with a 92 percent increase, due in part to the ever-rising popularity of YouTube.  The report also found that Twitter grew its bandwidth usage by 310 percent while Facebook increased its dominance with a 200 percent rise.

VoIP and IM applications grew significantly during this period becoming the second fastest growing traffic-type. Skype has continued to dominate this segment increasing its share of the global VoIP bandwidth from 77 percent in H2, 2009 to 83 percent in H1, 2010, leaving competitors like Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger behind.

However, Yahoo Messenger is still the most popular IM application, accounting for 29 percent of global IM bandwidth, even if its bandwidth share has reduced since the second half of 2009.

Allot Communications’ President and CEO, Rami Hadar said,  “The results of our latest MobileTrends Report reinforces that mobile broadband operators continue to face growing challenges as subscribers demand real-time content through an array of smartphones and Internet devices.”

“The findings also clearly demonstrate the close ties between mobile broadband and social networking. Whether it’s YouTube, Twitter or Facebook, social networking via mobile devices is becoming a ‘must have’ for subscribers and we expect that this is just the beginning,” added Hadar.

The Allot MobileTrends Report data was collected from January 1 to June 30, 2010 from leading mobile operators worldwide with a combined user base of 190 million subscribers. Allot gathered the data using the long term reporting capabilities of Allot NetXplorer, Allot’s centralized management and reporting system. The length of the collection period allows accurate identification of usage trends and patterns, reducing the influence of temporary events in the monitored networks.