If you want to find a clear-cut case of what exponential growth really means, check out this Fierce Wireless article that references a slew of reports on data usage projections.
The first reference is to a report from Chetan Sharma. As of the first quarter of 2015, US consumers used 3.5 GB of cellular data per month. That’s up from 2 GB per month at the end of 2014. The most compelling part of Sharma’s observations is that it took the U.S. 20 years to reach the 1 GB per user per month market. The 2GB mark was reached in less than 4 quarters. And today, it takes less than 75 hours to reach the entire years’ worth of mobile data traffic in 2007.
The article also cites data from Cisco, which shows North Americans used an average of 1.89 GB of mobile data per month in 2014 – a number that is expected to reach 11 GB in 2019.
Last but not least, data from Juniper Research indicates that mobile data traffic will reach nearly 197,000 petabytes by 2019, equivalent to over 10 billion Blu-ray movies. Of that data, 41% will be carried over cellular networks by 2019.
Other tidbits of note from Juniper include: Video traffic over smartphones will increase eight times between 2014 and 2019; and in 2014, data traffic generated by smartphones, feature phones and tablets in the Far East and China exceeded that of North America for the first time.
So the pundits are confirming what we’ve known all along. Ubiquitous mobile access is going to be more critical than ever. And when it comes to indoor coverage, it’s good to know that Cel-Fi Smart Signal Booster is up to the job, no matter how much traffic is thrown in its path.
Do you think these numbers will hold true? Or do you think they could be higher?
By Werner Sievers, CEO