The U.S. population has officially entered the gigabyte era of mobile data consumption.
According to Cisco Systems’ freshly published Visual Networking Index report on global mobile data trends, mobile data consumption is ballooning at an unprecedented rate across the global landscape.
Mobile users the world over came close to doubling their mobile data consumption between 2012 and 2013 as average monthly usage peaked well over 1 GB in the U.S, and several other countries.
“North America led the pack with the average mobile subscriber consuming 1.38 GBs a month, up from 752 MBs in 2012 and a full gigabyte more than the average global usage of 356 MBs,” summarizes Kevin Fitchard of Gigaom. “When looking at individual countries, Japanese users led the world with 1.87 GBs, followed by the U.S. at 1.41 GBs and South Korea with 1.25 GBs.”
Not surprisingly, faster smartphones and faster mobile networks are fueling this mammoth momentum of mobile data consumption.
In 2013, the world saw 1.5 exabytes of data cross mobile networks on a monthly basis. Based on Cisco’s latest projections, that number will reach 15.9 exabytes per month by 2018.
