Informa Telecoms and Media predicts that smart phone traffic will increase 700 percent in the next five years. The research firm said the greatest disparity between smart phone and non-smart phone traffic is in the United States, where smart phone users generate approximately 86 percent of mobile data traffic. Informa also predicted that the ATPU (average traffic per user, an Informa-created metric) in North America is likely to increase from today’s 85MB per month to 776MB per month by 2015. The highest smart phone ATPU rates currently are in South Korea (271MB per month) and Japan (199MB per month). According to Informa, the iPhone generates the most traffic, followed by Android handsets.
In related news, ABI Research forecasts that Sprint’s 4G smart phone sales for its WiMAX network will almost top 3 million by the end of the year. The carrier has gone online with WiMAX in more than 60 U.S. cities, most recently New York.
