US Mobile Internet Traffic Nearly Doubled This Year

Two big shifts happened in the American cellphone industry recently: Cellular networks got faster, and smartphone screens got bigger. As a result, people’s consumption of mobile data nearly doubled.

In the United States, consumers used an average of 1.2 gigabytes a month over cellular networks in 2013, up from 690 megabytes a month in 2012, according to Chetan Sharma, a consultant for wireless carriers, who published a new report on industry trends. Worldwide, the average consumption was 240 megabytes a month in 2013, up from 140 megabytes in 2012, he said. But what’s in a megabyte or gigabyte anyway? A megabyte is about the amount of data required to download a photo taken with a decent digital camera, or one minute of a song, or a decent stack of e-mail. So using that analogy -- 1.2 gigabytes of mobile data a month looks something like 1,200 photos that a person downloaded to the Internet from a mobile device each month, compared with 690 photos he downloaded a month in 2012.

[Dec 23]