In reply to Dave Burstein.

Dave,

Thanks for your kind words about the VNI forecast and team and your thoughtful comments. I agree with your point that innovation is rising to the occasion and that technology is getting better at wringing more efficiency out of spectrum. The problem is that, especially with the explosive growth in video consumption, including HD and increasingly 4K video, these improvements by themselves cannot keep pace with the demand. It’s an arms race between increasing demand and new techniques to be more efficient. In fact, we are seeing the mobile operators investing in these new technologies, something they would not be doing if they thought demand was flat or growing only slowly and they could just use what they have. Over the 2015-2020 forecast period, we see US mobile data traffic growing at a very healthy 42% CAGR and busy-hour traffic growing even faster at 45% CAGR which makes the additional point that you can’t just build or manage for “average” traffic. Finally, we are seeing that operators are increasingly curbing demand with data caps that are not keeping pace with consumer behavior, which is why WiFi offload is already 62% of traffic from mobile (SIM enabled) devices and forecast to grow to 69% in 2020.

As in the past, I expect we will be discussing the interpretations of our findings in multiple venues.

Best,

Pepper