Wireless Data Traffic More Than Doubled in US in 2013

The total amount of data handled by wireless carriers in the US more than doubled in 2013, an increase driven in large part by video traffic. US carriers saw 3.2 exabytes of data traffic run across their networks, the CTIA said in its annual report on the US wireless industry.

An exabyte is 10x18 bytes or, put another way, a billion gigabytes.

The figure represents a 120 percent increase from the 1.5 exabytes carried in all of 2012, the group said.

The data refers to traffic carried over licensed spectrum. With 336 million subscriptions in the US, that figure works out to an average of 801 megabytes per subscriber line per month. A large proportion of that data was video. That's an average of 563 megabytes per subscriber line per month.

US customers spent 218 billion minutes per month talking on their wireless devices, which works out to an average of 650 minutes per month per line; sent 153 billion text messages per month, or 457 messages per line; and 10 billion multimedia messages, or 30 per line.