In this year’s Mobility Report, Ericsson reduced the demand for mobile data dramatically, reflecting a noticeable slowdown in the growth rate for mobile data. Gone are the days of 100% data growth or even 50% data growth every year. The demand for mobile gigabytes slowed to about 22% in 2023, according to our benchmarks. By 2030, our modeling of existing applications leads to growth rates in the mid-teens (15-16%).
This is a recipe for very slow investment in the mobile industry and everybody losing their job.
Some people argue that it’s a human constraint: We can only watch four hours of video per day on our phones…there are only 24 hours, after all, so we can’t watch video all the time. There is some truth to this concept, which leads to ever-lower growth numbers.
Bleak. Grim. Boring. The winter of 5G has been chilly so far. But…
Some new applications are starting to sprout like flowers in the springtime. The most exciting new application is the extension of “Voice Assistants” like Siri and Google Assistant to add capabilities as an AI Assistant. Siri’s AI upgrade should be introduced next month in our favorite Silicon Valley holiday: September’s Apple New Product Intro.
Most people focus on the computing requirements of AI. After all, ChatGPT and other Gen-AI services involve text or images. The computing workload can be huge, but the data sent by the mobile network is only text in many cases. Until now, AI has not affected the 5G network very much. That will change.
An AI Assistant will monitor your ‘screen’ on your smartphone, taking a snapshot periodically as it navigates through a task. Ask your Assistant to book a trip to San Diego. It will click on the right buttons, enter your information and credit card data, find a hotel, rent the car, etc. Every dropdown menu and data entry field needs to be watched, as humans normally do. With enough complexity, this starts to look like an uplink video stream with a lot of data.
The encouraging part of this application is that 660 million people use Siri, and similar numbers use Google or Amazon assistants. Unlike AR/VR and other hopeful applications, there is a market here with users that are already in place. These users won’t even perceive that they’re loading a new application….it will simply be the latest version of their familiar “assistant."
We’ve just published a high-level analysis of how AI Assistants and other applications will drive a spike in mobile uplink traffic. The operators feel comfortable with their downlink capacity with their shiny 5G mid-band networks, but they could be blindsided by the spike in AI uplink traffic, driving demand well beyond capacity. Our modeling takes new frequency bands, FWA, small cells, and mm-wave into account, and we’ve validated our conclusions with several major operators.
Does this mean a new surge in mobile infrastructure investment? We have some thoughts about that, and we will connect the dots over the next four months. We see this trend as an opportunity for the operators to justify some premium pricing plans and to add small cells and new spectrum into urban hotspots. Stay tuned for additional articles along these lines.
Joe Madden is principal analyst at Mobile Experts, a network of market and technology experts that analyze wireless markets.
Industry Voices are op-eds from industry experts or analysts invited to contribute by Fierce staff. They do not represent the opinions of Fierce.