Digital 2025: mobile data consumption trends
One of the consequences of accelerating mobile internet speeds has been a significant increase in the amount of mobile data consumed by the world’s smartphone users.
Indeed, analysis from Ericsson shows that the amount of data transferred over cellular data networks has increased more than sevenfold in just the past 6 years.
More specifically, the company’s intelligence points to a monthly average of 21.78 exabytes (EB) of data transfer back in Q3 2018, when the typical smartphone user consumed just 4.9 GB of cellular data per month.
By Q3 2024, that global total had jumped to an average of 157.16 EB per month, with each handset consuming an average of 21.6 GB per month.
Much of this growth has been fuelled by the rise of mobile video, with Ericsson reporting that video applications account for more than 111 EB per month, out of total smartphone-attributable traffic of close to 147 EB.
For perspective, Ericsson’s figures reveal that video now accounts for more than three-quarters of all cellular data traffic, or three times more than all other categories combined.
Social networking claims the next largest share of cellular traffic, with apps in this category responsible for more than 11.5 EB of data each month.
Mobile data consumption in context
If you’re struggling to get your head around “exabytes”, you might find it helpful to know that 111 EB is equal to 111 billion gigabytes, or 111 trillion megabytes.
In other words, if you wanted to store all of the video data that gets transferred over cellular networks in just one month on conventional DVDs, you’d need somewhere in the region of 23.5 billion discs.
And if you wanted to pile each of those discs one on top of the other, your stack would be well over 28,000 kilometres high.
For reference, the Kármán line – which is commonly viewed as the outer limit of Earth, where “space” begins – is barely 100 kilometres above sea level.
And that’s just for one month’s worth of video data.
Indeed, based on current trends, the stack of DVDs you’d need to store all of the video data that will be transferred over cellular networks in 2025 would reach the moon.
The environmental impact of mobile video
But while these numbers make for great trivia, there’s also a darker side to these eye-watering stats.
According to a report from GSMA Intelligence, mobile networks used on average 0.13 kWh of energy to transfer 1 GB of data in 2021.
Networks may have improved efficiency since then of course, but if we use that figure as a benchmark, current averages indicate that our mobile video habits consume more than 14.4 billion kWh of energy every month.
And what’s more, that figure only accounts for the energy required to transfer the video data itself, ignoring other critical factors such as the energy required to power the world’s 7.4 billion smartphone handsets, and the power required to retrieve the video data from platforms’ servers.
Approaches to generating electricity vary meaningfully around the world (e.g. nuclear, coal, renewables, etc.), so it’s exceptionally difficult to calculate the associated carbon footprint of this energy consumption.
However, for perspective, the Mayor of London reports that the city consumed a combined total of 36.7 billion kWh of electricity for the whole of 2022 across domestic, industrial, commercial, and electric rail needs, which equates to an average of just over 3 billion kWh each month.
And while London’s energy consumption might have increased in the past couple of years, these figures suggest that the world’s smartphone video activity consumes almost 5 times more electricity than the whole of London does.
So, you may want to keep those numbers in mind the next time you find yourself doomscrolling a never-ending video feed.
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This article is a sub-section of our Digital 2025 Global Overview Report.
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