OK, so the Football World Cup was a dismal experience for England fans and the Final itself was a travesty of a match distinguished only by the huge number of professional (and not so professional) fouls on and off the ball, but the event was a triumph for the host nation, South Africa, and also for mobile comms technologies and the data services and applications that carriers provided, as Martyn Warwick reports.
The MobileTrends World Cup Report from Allot Communications tracked global IP application and mobile bandwidth usage during the FIFA 2010 World Cup and the anonymous data underpinning the report was collected during 42 World Cup matches played between 11 June to 11 July 2010 and was sourced from operators all over the world.
The report shows that, as expected, the small screen did not supercede the big screen TV during the World Cup but it did create what Allot Communications is calling a "new category" wherein, rather than replacing televisions, mobile devices operated alongside them and carved-out a new niche in enhancing the viewer experience by offering additional information in real time and providing the ability for fans to watch replays at leisure and share them with friends through viral distribution.
The report also shows in some remarkable detail the effects that events of mass popularity such as the World Cup can have on comms networks, services and applications.
For example, the use of mobile data bandwidth shot up by 24 per cent over the course of the World Cup whilst, during the matches themselves web browsing traffic increased by an astonishing 35 per cent!
What's more, traffic on YouTube rose by 32 per cent on the morning after the matches of the evening before as fans replayed their favourite moments and this gave extra impetus to the 16 per cent overall increase in mobile data bandwidth usage in the mornings over the course of the World Cup.
Interestingly it was the afternoon games that provoked a 31 per cent spike in bandwidth demand but video streaming and P2P traffic rose only moderately - by 11 per cent and 13 per cent respectively.
Commenting on the results of the survey, Rami Hadar, the president and CEO of Allot Communications, said, "The World Cup highlights the integral role that mobile devices and mobile broadband have come to play in our busy lives and how consumers use them to enhance their lifestyles by accessing information anytime, anywhere. This global tournament demonstrated the continued rise of mobile data usage, in particular web and video traffic."
It did indeed.
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