Global mobile data traffic continued to grow at a healthy rate in the second quarter, driven in part by free data offers in India, according to the latest figures from Ericsson. Total traffic rose 67 percent year-on-year and 10 percent on a quarterly basis to over 10 exabytes per month.
The growth is driven by an increase in smartphone subscriptions and higher average data volume per subscription, fueled primarily by more viewing of video content, Ericsson said. The recent introductory free data traffic offers in India also noticeably pushed up global traffic.
Around 56 percent of all mobile subscriptions worldwide now use smartphones, and Ericsson estimates around 80 percent of the 370 million phones sold in Q2 were smartphones. In total, there are some 5.3 billion mobile subscriptions in the world, of which around 2.4 billion use LTE.
China remains the fastest-growing mobile market, adding around 19 million subscriptions in the quarter, followed by India (+17 million), Indonesia (+7 million), the Philippines (+7 million) and
Ghana (+4 million). In total, 92 million subscriptions were added worldwide during the quarter.
