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The recent soccer World Cup held in South Africa, was a tribute to developer ingenuity everywhere, and despite all expectations that video would be the key mobile activity, watching goals or games, it was in fact the profusion of World Cup oriented mobile Apps which drove a 24% increase in mobile broadband usage. The details come from Allot Communications and its MobileTrends World Cup report which tracked global mobile broadband usage during the events across 90 million users, and compared them with average usage figures.

This World Cup may in fact create a precedent in how to drive cellular traffic around events of this type. Mobile web browsing was up 35% during the tournament, while YouTube traffic rose by 32%, but only on post-match mornings. The growth in mobile web browsing occurred continuously throughout all matches.

And even increases in web browsing appear to stem as much from the mobile applications, providing football and match-related information in real time, as general web lookups. Throughout the period, the World Cup dominated all social media sites, from Facebook to Twitter.

World Cup apps were developed for every mobile platform, and achieved staggering popularity with millions of registered downloads. These apps offered fans the chance to do everything from produce the sound of a Vuvuzela or play their own World Cup game, to receive live match updates and statistics on teams and players. Some of the more popular iPhone and Android apps include ESPN 2010 FIFA World Cup, Total Football 2010, World DroidCup, and 2010 World Cup South Africa.

But despite expectations, video streaming saw a relatively modest increase of 11%, and was typically not consumed in real time, at least not on mobile networks.

Separately we noted that the South African Government had promised for years before the event that it would be carried on a handset using DVB-H broadcast TV technology, but in the end it only issued a license a few weeks before the event and even then only to a company with no transmission infrastructure, so the promise was not kept.

Allot's study says that the largest increase in mobile broadband was during lunchtime matches when it was up 31%, closely followed by the afternoon matches (28%). The Allot MobileTrends World Cup Report is based on statistics collected from mobile networks around the world representing more than 90 million subscribers.

Separate figures from FIFA showed that over 220,000 people followed FIFA's official tweets on Twitter, while members of the five million-strong FIFA.com Club swapped 120 million virtual stickers and made over one million comments on the website as they debated the finer points of the tournament.

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