The study highlights the pressure these companies place on network capacity and the need for a model that incentivizes more efficient use of this resource.
7 October 2024, Buenos Aires: In the context of the fair share debate, GSMA today presents ‘Mobile network usage in Latin America,’ the first in a series of reports to contribute to the regional discussion with data and evidence. This initial report offers a snapshot of mobile traffic in the region up to 2024, broken down by company and content type, both at an aggregate level and by subregion and/or country. The most striking conclusion of the study is that three companies ― Meta, Alphabet (Google), and TikTok ― generate over 70% of mobile download traffic in Latin America. Meta accounts for nearly 50%, Alphabet adds 14%, and TikTok 8%.
The report also examines mobile traffic by type of usage, with social media (41%), web browsing (29%), and streaming (19%) leading the way. This ranking is consistent across the region, with some variations. In Central America and Mexico, for example, the order remains the same, but social media accounts for nearly 60% of the total. In Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay, streaming surpasses web browsing. In the Andean Region, streaming climbs to the most popular category, representing 38% of the total.
The common denominator in all three cases is the intensive use of video, whether in short or long format. The demand for data from this type of content will continue to grow as resolutions increase from HD to 4K, and eventually 8K, and as live-streamed events expand. Audiovisual content is one of the main drivers of the sustained growth in mobile traffic, which multiplied 14 times between 2016 and 2023. The annual growth in 2023 alone exceeded the total volume of traffic in the region five years earlier, in 2018. By 2030, annual traffic is expected to grow by 22 exabytes (22 billion gigabytes) compared to the previous year, nearly double the annual growth recorded in 2023, which was 12 exabytes. This increase will place even more pressure on mobile network capacity.
“When we see 70% of mobile traffic concentrated in three companies, one might think it’s simply a reflection of user choice. But the reality is that a considerable portion of that traffic is unsolicited, like the ads we see when we open our apps or videos in resolutions far higher than what our devices can display,” says Lucas Gallitto, Director for Latin America, GSMA. “Today, platforms don’t bear costs for that traffic they monetize, which negatively impacts user experience, network capacity, and the environment. This highlights the need for fair share: a market mechanism in which major traffic generators contribute to network funding, incentivizing more efficient use of this public resource.”
The report ‘Mobile network usage in Latin America’ is available for download in Spanish, Portuguese, and English here.
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