Canadians’ data usage increased 40% last year, CRTC says

Data usage by Canadians on both wireline and wireless networks rose significantly last year, hitting 104 GB per month for residential Internet and almost 1 GB for wireless subscribers, the CRTC said in the second part of its Communications Monitoring Report, released Wednesday. “Data usage increased by 44 for wireless and approximately 40 for residential Internet services from 2014 to 2015,” the commission said in a press release. In contrast to the broadcasting sector, which saw a decline of 1.6 per cent between 2014 and 2015, revenues in the telecom sector grew 4.1 per cent, to $47.8 billion. That was a higher rate of growth than reported in last year’s report, when telecom revenues grew 2.4 per cent, and higher than the average growth over the last five years, which averaged 2.8 per cent, the report noted. Canadians used up an average of 93 GB per month consuming content on wireline networks, and 10.9 GB uploading data, a 26.8 per cent increase, according to the report. That downloaded data figure rose an average of 50.4 per cent every year for the past five years, “indicating that Canadians are likely using more video content and other high-bandwidth-consuming services,” the report said. Wireless subscribers used an average of 988 MB downloading and uploading data every month. Average revenue per user (ARPU) was also up for wireless and wireline subscribers, increasing 6.6 per cent for residential Internet subscribers, to $50.91 per month for all types of providers. Among large service providers only, and excluding dial-up services, ARPU was $54, a 7.9-per-cent increase. The average residential Internet plan also increased to 141.94 GB, with an average download speed for all tiers of 29.15 Mbps and an average upload speed of 5.5 Mbps. “Canadians’ appetite to access mobile applications, multi-media services, social networking, Internet browsing, and other data intensive activities have driven smartphone adoption rates higher and wireless data revenue growth to over 15.7 in 2015, and, on average, 18.8 over the past five years,” the CRTC said. Wireless ARPU was up five per cent in 2015, to $64.1 a month, while the number of wireless subscribers grew 3.4 per cent between 2014 and 2015, reaching 29.8 million in 2015. While retail revenues from landlines fell six per cent to $8.7 billion, retail wireline Internet revenues grew 9.9 per cent to $9.2 billion and wireless revenues grew 7.5 per cent to $22.5 billion. Wireless revenue reached its highest growth rate in more than five years, at 7.6 per cent, the CRTC said. The CRTC also gave an update on fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) deployment, noting that in 2015 telcos had passed 3.3 million homes with fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP), compared to 7.7 million homes that had access to telco copper lines connected to fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) networks. Among all residential lines in Canada, 8.9 per cent were FTTP (up from 6.2 per cent last year), while FTTN made up 22.9 per cent of lines and 68.1 per cent were non-fibre lines, the CRTC said. Almost all — about 98 per cent — of Canadians had access to download speeds of at least 5 Mbps, the CRTC said, though only 95 per cent had access to 1 Mbps upload speeds as well. — With reporting by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca and editing by Charelle Evelyn at cevelyn@thewirereport.ca

Canadians’ data usage increased 40% last year, CRTC says

News | October 26, 2016

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Canadians’ data usage increased 40% last year, CRTC says

News | October 26, 2016

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