Survey Sez 07/26/12

Juniper Research says Samsung has taken “a sizeable lead” in the smartphone market in terms of unit shipments. In 2Q12, the company estimates Samsung shipped more than 52 million smartphones, more than double the number shipped by Apple. Samsung also doubled its lead over Apple quarter-on-quarter, with its Galaxy S3 bringing in $10 million in June. However, with consumers waiting for the next iPhone expected later in the year, “Apple will undoubtedly narrow the gap,” Juniper adds…According to Ovum, even though Wi-Fi offload now is being included in the majority of infrastructure strategy plans, today’s carrier-grade solutions don’t meet operators’ needs. More than half of operators polled expect session continuity when moving between Wi-Fi and wireless networks, while more than 90 percent also are looking for a device-based policy solution that would select the best network (3G/4G/Wi-Fi) based on cost, performance and other policy-driven features. Operators are willing to work with what they call "untrusted" or "non-controlled" Wi-Fi networks, Ovum says, including free public networks that aren’t controlled by an operator, like those in hotels or libraries. Fewer than half of the operators surveyed said their companies were taking any measure to evaluate application performance before allowing those applications to access their networks…The global volume of mobile data traffic will top 107 exabytes in 2017, predicts ABI Research, translating into eight times more than what is expected for 2012. But how significant a growth rate would this represent, exactly? According to senior analyst Aapo Markkanen, “It looks like 2015 will be the last year when the traffic volume will grow by more than 50 percent annually. And that will happen despite the fact that the monthly average per wireless subscriber, worldwide, will increase to almost 1.5 gigabytes by the end of our forecasting period.”