iGR, a leading market research firm via its latest study on global mobile data traffic estimates that in 2014, approximately 2.6 million terabytes of mobile data traffic flowed over the world's cellular data networks per month, and expects the number to rise to 16.7 million terabytes per month by 2019. iGR attributes the expected seven-fold rise in traffic to the continuous increase in the number of mobile data subscribers across the globe and the increasing dependence on data among the younger generation which sees a lot of rich content being accessed via mobile devices.
iGR said that its report provides information on the 4 types of usage profiles - light, medium, heavy and extreme - and that the profiling is developed based on the activities and applications used by the end-users such as checking email, downloading or streaming music or video, or checking social sites, Voice over IP (and Voice over LTE) on a per application or per use basis. iGR's analysis reflects the correlation between the amount of data consumed and the type of activity or content accessed as some activities such as streaming video and uploading of photos can really eat up into the users' data quota while other applications such as accessing email or general browsing may consume much less.
Iain Gillott, president and founder of iGR
iGR believes that the consumption of mobile data will grow aggressively over the forecast period in both developing markets and more mature markets. The drivers of this growth include network rollouts, such as upgrades to LTE and LTE-Advanced, reasonably priced data-centric smartphones, and the trend toward consuming content stored in the cloud.
