DATA STORY: The world will consume 110 billion GB of mobile data per month by 2023

The monthly mobile data consumption of the world which currently stands at 14 ExaBytes or 14 billion GB will grow exponentially to 110 billion GB in 2023, according to an estimate published by Ericsson. The data consumption will grow at the compound annual growth rate of 42 percent.

That means, if the mobile data consumed by the world in one month in 2023 is stored in DVD’s and stacked one above another, it will reach a height of 28,085 kilometres in space. For comparison, the International Space Station orbits the earth at the height of mere 408 kilometres.

India currently consumes 3.9 GB data per device per month. The Ericsson report attributed this ‘high average’ to Jio’s introductory offer last year. “The high average usage in India – estimated to reach 3.9GB per month per smartphone at the end of 2017 – is mainly due to an introductory LTE offer by an operator during the latter half of 2016, which included free voice and data traffic,” it says.

Legends: LAM- Latin America, NAM- North America, APAC- Asia Pacific, CEMA- Central Europe Middle East Africa, WE- Western Europe; 1 PetaByte= 1000TerraByte. The graph shows expected growth of total data traffic via smartphones till 2023. Source: Ericsson

The report projects a growth of 361 percent in monthly mobile data traffic for India by 2023. People in India will be consuming 18 GB data per device six years from now.

North America will lead the mobile data traffic in 2023 in the world. It is consuming 7.1 GB data per mobile device in 2017 and will be consuming 48 GB data per device in 2023.

Legends: 1 PetaByte= 1000TerraByte. The graph shows data traffic by device type. Source: Ericsson

Videos are going to be driving force behind the increase in world data traffic. Video content will account for three fourth of total data traffic in 2023. That is, the world will be viewing 82.5 billion GB of video content per month on their mobile devices six years on. Currently, videos account for 55 percent of all mobile data traffic.

Voice data traffic

The voice traffic will also see a growth albeit comparatively much slower than data traffic. From current traffic of 259 million GB per month, it will reach 289 million GB per month, a growth of more than 11 percent over six years. That translates into 28,339 billion minutes in 2017 to 31,611 billion minutes in 2023.

Legends: LAM- Latin America, NAM- North America, APAC- Asia Pacific, CEMA- Central Europe Middle East Africa, WE- Western Europe. The graph shows expected voice data traffic in billion minutes per year. Source: Ericsson

The Asia-Pacific region is and will continue to be the biggest contributor towards data traffic. People living in this area will talk for 18,201 billion minutes in 2023. Comparatively, in 2017, people in this region talked for 16,084 minutes.

Subscriptions

The report forecasts that by the end of 2023 there will be 9.1 billion mobile subscriptions. The mobile broadband subscription will climb to 8.5 billion. In comparison, the United Nations projects the world population to be 8.03 billion in 2023.

However, the number of unique mobile subscribers is estimated to be 6.1 billion by 2023. Thus the actual estimated mobile penetration will be 75 percent.

The report also estimates that by 2023, there will be over 1 billion 5G subscriptions across the world. The definitions for 5G is yet to be finalised and the technology is expected to see the light of the day by 2019-20.

LTE, on the other hand, will be the dominant technology with 5.5 billion subscriptions. In India, 60 percent of all subscriptions will be LTE.

Disclaimer: Reliance Industries Ltd. - that owns Reliance Jio - is the sole beneficiary of Independent Media Trust which controls Network18 Media & Investments Ltd.