The use of mobile data has increased by about three hundred times worldwide in the past ten years. This should be apparent from the Mobility Report of network specialist Ericsson.
It is not surprising that, with the rise of smartphones, IoT and everything that comes with it, we are consuming more mobile data than a decade ago. What is remarkable is perhaps the size of that additional consumption.
According to Ericsson, an additional 5.5 billion smartphone users have been added since 2011. Another comparison? We used more mobile data in the third quarter of 2021 alone than in the entire period from 2011 to 2016. In numbers, that’s about 78 exabytes.
It is now the tenth time that Ericsson has published a Mobility Report. During that time, mobile data traffic worldwide has increased three hundred times. By the end of 2027, Ericsson expects that the total mobile data traffic will reach 370 exabytes. About half of that would be consumed by all kinds of networked IoT ‘things’.
Ericsson is a network infrastructure provider, so the company is also eagerly looking forward to the further emergence of 5G. The company expects there to be 4.4 billion 5G subscriptions worldwide by the end of 2027, which would make up about half of the mobile subscriptions at that time.
By the end of this year, there are already about 660 million 5G subscriptions, which immediately suggests that the implementation of 5G is going a lot faster than previous generations of mobile network technology.
