Effect of LTE service adoption on mobile data traffic in Korea

After LTE service is launched in many countries, the number of subscribers of LTE service is globally increasing rapidly. Data traffic caused by LTE users is also in a rapid growth, since LTE supports high data rate services such as multimedia applications, web, and data services. Although LTE service contributes to the rapid data traffic increase, the LTE traffic partially substitute for the traffic of traditional mobile communication services such as 2G and 3G. In this paper, we estimate traffic substitution rate of LTE for 3G services in Korea. For that, we first predict the number of subscribers of 3G services assuming that LTE service is not adopted. Then Effect of LTE on subscribers and traffic of traditional mobile services and total mobile traffic in Korea is presented.