Ericsson's latest Mobility Report also estimates mobile data traffic increased 65 percent year-on-year and 12 percent sequentially in Q4, to over 5,000 petabytes per month. The growth is driven both by more smartphone users and higher data usage per person, driven by demand for online video. Ericsson estimates that a net 20 exabytes of mobile data traffic was added in 2015 (compared to 12 exabytes in 2014, 9 in 2013), half of which came from mobile video.
Its latest report also highlights the growing share of social networking in mobile data traffic. Accumulated social networking traffic over the next six years is forecast to be around 180 exabytes, or 12 times the volume of the past six years. That is comparable to every person on earth spending around 35 minutes on social media every day.
