Tablets are set to create 17 percent of all wireless data demand by 2020. Already, the media-saavy tablet category creates five times as much data traffic as the average smartphone. The tablet’s demand on the network is growing at 30 percent per year, according to Goldman Sachs.
As an illustration, the Cisco Global Mobile Date Forecast says the average data traffic in 2010 per tablet was around 405MB each month. By comparison, a smartphone generates 79MB of data traffic each month.
We’ve seen wireless carriers react to smartphones, such as the iPhone, by throttling bandwidth. Could we see a similar battle soon over the data demands created by tablets?
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
