With the rise of mobile networks and the increase in usage, it is sometimes difficult to get an idea of the quantity of data exchanged between different mobiles. And in the United States, the CTIA — Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association — has an answer: In 2023, the country’s 5G networks transferred 100.1 trillion megabytes, or about 100 billion GB.
100,100,000,000,000 of Mo. Image CTIA.
This is an increase of 89% compared to 2021, and it is partly linked to 5G: almost 40% of connected devices in the country use this network. The CTIA also gives another point of comparison: the 100 billion gigabytes of 2023 represent more data than all the transmissions made between 2010 and 2018. The group also indicates that the number of devices per American is 1.6 (558 million).
Between 2020 and 2023, the number of 5G devices increased from 14 million to 216 million (3% to 39%). CTIA image.
It should be noted that this increase in traffic is correlated with a reduction in the price of subscriptions, visible both in the United States and in France. The price per megabyte has been reduced by 50% since 2020 and is estimated at $0.002 per MB (or around twenty dollars for a subscription with 10 GB of data, significantly more than in France). This is also one of the reasons for the explosion in traffic: fast connections coupled with plans with high limits (several tens of gigabytes) allow users to really take advantage of their devices. If we go back to the first iPhone, the figures can make you smile: the EDGE did not exceed 0.2 Mb/s in (very) good conditions and if the first plans for iPhone were “unlimited”, Orange reserved the right to reduce the throughput beyond 500 MB.
Reports from other years (from 2021 to 2023) are also available on the association’s website.
