According to ABI Research, the mobile service revenues worldwide witnessed a growth of 2.8 per cent in 2014. The revenue growth was driven by data services and is despite decline in mobile voice revenues across all regions.

The research firm states that there is a growing demand for rich content led services including high definition video, loss-less music, and high-speed games. Further, the gap between average revenue per user (ARPU) generated by 4G and 3G is expected to widen over the period 2014 to 2020. Going forward, intense competition in the industry will drive down the ARPU for mobile operators, but the 4G ARPU will be higher as a result of growing demand for 4G led high speed data services.

ABI research concludes that data shows that in 2015, 4G data traffic has started to dominate the total traffic consumption. The annual global 4G data usage in 2020 is expected to exceed 224.7 exabytes, accounting for 79 per cent of the total data traffic.