U.S. Mobile Internet Traffic Nearly Doubled This Year
Two big shifts happened in the American cellphone industry over the past year: Cellular networks got faster, and smartphone screens got bigger. As a result, people's consumption of mobile data nearly doubled.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is at least the second straight doubling the corpus has recorded: GigaOM reported U.S. mobile data traffic doubled in the twelve months to October 2011, and Nielsen's numbers that year showed why — average smartphone usage rose 89% even as the cost per megabyte fell 46%, with teens tripling their data use.
What changed by late 2013 is the mechanism: faster cellular networks plus bigger smartphone screens turned cheap bandwidth into heavier consumption. The story traveled widely for a year-end datapoint — pickups included the Los Angeles Times, Business Insider, BGR, TechHive and DSLreports — suggesting operators and investors were treating the growth rate itself as news.
First-order effects
- Carriers absorb a near-doubling of traffic on networks they built for last year's load, pushing LTE capacity upgrades and spectrum purchases up their spending schedules.
- Consumers on capped plans see usage approach plan limits faster, making overage fees and shared-data pricing the immediate battleground between subscribers and operators.
Second-order effects
- Device makers face pressure to keep enlarging screens, since the article attributes the surge partly to display size — a hardware arms race where each generation of phone raises baseline data consumption.
- Operators lean harder on tiered and shared-data structures to monetize volume rather than minutes, because flat-rate pricing against compounding demand erodes margins.
Third-order effects
- If traffic keeps doubling on roughly a two-year cadence — 2011 and again in 2013 per this corpus — spectrum scarcity and backhaul investment become permanent policy and capital-allocation issues rather than episodic ones.
- The pattern points toward an industry structured around selling data capacity instead of voice, with pricing power shifting to whoever controls network throughput.
The trend: U.S. mobile data demand compounds every couple of years as each round of faster networks and bigger screens unlocks new consumption, forcing carriers into a perpetual capacity-and-pricing rebuild.