Broadcom, a firm that makes chipsets for mobile phones and is a major player in the wireless communications segment, on Tuesday said over 50 billion devices will be connected to the internet in the next 10 years. In an interaction with journalists, the company said video dominates mobile internet traffic across the world, with a share of 66 per cent.
Speaking about India, Broadcom’s head of global business development Shriraj Gaglani said YouTube gets around 40 per cent of Indian traffic from mobile phones. ?Around 150 million homes in India have access to TVs, but only 15 million have broadband. Around 40 per cent of YouTube’s 55 million monthly unique visitors from India access the site from smartphones,? Gaglani said.
A recent study titled ?Getting Mobile Right? by Yahoo and Mindshare says over 95 per cent of smartphone use in India is for entertainment. A large portion of this can be attributed to the obsession with Bollywood, and YouTube is a popular source for Bollywood videos and news.
As the need for wireless internet connectivity (WiFi, 3G, 4G, etc) rises, Broadcom says some of its ideas could help users connect more devices to the same access point without fear of disconnection.
One of these is called Passpoint. ?Passpoint allows phones to connect with different WiFi access points similar to cellular networks,? Gaglani said. With compatible devices and access points, users will not have to search for WiFi networks and enter a password to connect every time.
Broadcom says mobile video traffic is expected to grow a whopping 87 times by 2017. This is corroborated by Cisco?s 2013 Visual Networking Index, which says mobile data traffic in India is projected to reach 900 petabytes (943 million GB) per month by 2017, with 60 per cent coming from mobile video alone.
Since video is driving the demand for smartphones, Broadcom feels wireless screen sharing will be heavily used in India. For this, it has a technology called Miracast. ?Miracast allows users to play videos on a large screen through their phones. All users need is a Miracast dongle connected to the TV,? Michael Civiello, senior director of Broadcom’s business development, said.
However, Miracast is far from perfect as of now. Although streaming worked flawlessly during a demo session by Broadcom, there was a noticeable lag in screen sharing between the smartphone and the TV. This means that Miracast is good for watching videos or other passive activities, but not for interactive uses such as gaming. ?Miracast has been around only for a year and over time, there will be improvements to the technology,? Gaglani said.
For crowded WiFi networks, Broadcom has a plan to manage traffic. Since most modern WiFi routers are dual band (2.4 GHz and 5 GHz), Broadcom feels this could be leveraged by using the lower frequency for data and the higher one for video. This, Broadcom says, could help reduce stalling, which is a major problem in India according to an Opera Skyfire report released last week.
Opera Skyfire?s data says 56 per cent of videos experienced playback issues on India?s 3G networks. This figure rose to over 99 per cent on 2G networks.
Broadcom is a major player in the smartphone components business and supplies various parts to major mobile manufacturers such as Apple Inc., Samsung, HTC and Xolo.
