Mobile data traffic doubled in past 12 months
Thanks to our obsession with our iPhones, Android devices and iPads, the demand for mobile data is exploding. Data from Ericsson, which makes a majority of its money by selling hardware to mobile phone companies, shows that from the second quarter …
Context & Ripple Effects
Ericsson's measurement lands at the end of a year that has been building toward it: Nielsen found U.S. smartphone data usage up 89% even as the cost per megabyte fell 46% (per-megabyte costs dropped 46%), and ReadWriteWeb projected 75 exabytes of annual mobile traffic by 2015 (the 75-exabytes-by-2015 forecast). Ericsson — which makes most of its money selling hardware to mobile operators — now reports that total traffic actually doubled over the past twelve months, with iPhones, Android handsets and iPads doing the consuming.
The composition matters as much as the total. Nielsen had already flagged Android smartphones as the most data-hungry devices back in May, and comScore put Android at 40% of U.S. smartphone share by August — so the doubling is being driven disproportionately by the platform gaining subscribers fastest.
First-order effects
- Mobile operators face an immediate capacity bill: with traffic doubling annually, their primary supplier Ericsson is positioned to sell more radio hardware, and flat-rate plans priced against falling per-MB costs become unsustainable at current consumption curves.
- Apple, Google and tablet makers get confirmation that device sales translate directly into network load — each new iPhone or iPad sold deepens the carrier-side demand for infrastructure spend.
Second-order effects
- Carriers will be pushed toward tiered, usage-based pricing to reconcile a 46% decline in per-MB revenue with doubling volumes, ending the unlimited-data era that fueled adoption in the first place.
- Media and brand advertisers gain leverage: iOS and Android apps already offer what Fox positioned as constant, prime-time-like audience access, and a doubling user base makes Android an increasingly credible media platform rivaling Apple's digital dominance.
Third-order effects
- If the doubling cadence holds, the industry structurally shifts from flat-rate consumer plans to metered pricing, with network vendors like Ericsson riding a capex supercycle tied to traffic rather than subscriber counts.
- Traffic growth decoupled from subscriber growth means competition moves from signing users to managing bandwidth — favoring operators who offload to Wi-Fi and small cells, and making spectrum allocation a recurring regulatory battleground.
The trend: Mobile data demand is compounding far faster than subscriber growth, forcing carriers off flat-rate pricing and into a continuous infrastructure-buildout cycle.