Global Mobile Data Traffic to Exceed 10 Million Terabytes Per Month by 2017

Published on: 19th Feb 2013

­Cellular mobile data traffic is forecast to grow from 889,000 terabytes per month in 2012 to 10.3 million terabytes per month in 2017, according to iGR. This forecast does not include Wi-Fi traffic offloaded from the cellular network.

iGR's mobile data traffic model estimates the amount of bandwidth consumed by a given activity -- e.g., checking email, listening to streaming music or watching streaming video, checking social sites, etc. iGR has estimated the traffic generated on a per application/use basis along with a forecast for how many times in a given time period an end user engages in the given activity.

"Although we expect developing markets' consumption of mobile data to grow faster than consumption in more mature markets, mobile data growth is significant in every region," said Iain Gillott, president and founder of iGR, a market research consultancy focused on the wireless and mobile industry. "In more mature markets the growth is driven by network upgrades to LTE, multiple devices per user, increasing mobile device and data usage, and a trend toward consuming content stored in the cloud via mobile devices."

Generally speaking, the larger the device, the more bandwidth is consumed on it. That is, a laptop connection will likely generate far more traffic than a smartphone. This is primarily because a laptop is far more conducive to heavy usage than a smartphone and is typically used in a place where the user is stationary and disposed toward consuming/generating a great deal of data traffic.

That said, the advent of streaming video and audio applications (Pandora, Netflix, HBO Go, Amazon Cloud Player, etc.), not to mention YouTube, makes consuming hundreds of megabytes on a smartphone quite easy. The key difference, of course, is that the laptop user could be multitasking among several different high-traffic applications whereas the smartphone user is typically only engaged in one, maybe two.