According to industry analyst Chetan Sharma, a consultant for wireless carriers, mobile data usage nearly doubled in the last year. On a global scale the average is now at 240MB per month, up from 140MB last year, while usage on the US jumped from 690MB to 1.2GB on average during 2013.
Sharma said the growth in data use could be attributed to the widespread coverage LTE, along with faster and bigger smartphones better suited for browsing. Though not explicitly mentioned in the report, the growing popularity of mobile apps such as Instagram, Snapchat and Vine probably played their part too.
This news is very beneficial to companies like T-Mobile or Sprint, which unlike Verizon and AT&T, don’t enforce hard limits on data usage per month. For now the average is still within lower than 4GB traffic, and although Verizon’s CEO has said unlimited plans are not sustainable there’s nothing stopping them from gradually adapting to consumers’ growing needs.
Wi-Fi does not get neglected in all this, and also holds a key point in internet connectivity, helping offload as much as 60% to 70% of the total traffic in most countries. With Wi-Fi sharing services like Fon making their way to the US in 2013 and companies like Republic Wireless falling back to Wi-Fi to provide service, there’s still a lot going on in this space to keep you from being at the mercy of wireless carriers’ data caps and overage charges.
Thank you Tech Spot for providing us with this information
