Mobile Data Traffic Projected to Grow 762% by 2018 in Canada

The rapidly growing connected mobile devices market also means a huge growth in the volume of data travelling on the mobile networks of Canadian wireless companies. To put that into numbers, mobile data traffic in Canada is expected to jump 762% in 2018, Cisco Systems Inc. reports (via the Financial Post).

As the report points out, roughly 28.6 petabytes (PB) of data is travelling each month across the telcos’ mobile networks as of today. But this is expected to increase to 246.8 petabytes four years from now.

To understand what this amount of data means exactly: 246.8 PB is equal to about 62 million DVDs per month, or 680 million text messages per second. All of this is going through the country’s mobile network.

Zooming out to a global scale, the Cisco report found that 4G connections will post an eight-fold growth over the next five years, accounting for 15% of all mobile connections by 2018.

Cell tower

It is worth noting that an average Canadian smartphone user generates about 1,067 megabytes of mobile data on a monthly basis. This number more than doubles when it comes to 4G-enabled devices: 2,226MB/month.

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