For the first time in the mobile industry’s 25-year history, data traffic has overtaken voice traffic on the world’s wireless networks, Swedish vendor Ericsson has calculated.
Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg said the 400 million mobile broadband subscriptions worldwide were filling up more capacity than the voice traffic from the total 4.6 billion mobile subscriptions.
The crossover of approximately 140,000 Terabytes occurred in December, he said.
According to Ericsson, the world’s biggest mobile network vendor, data traffic globally grew 280% during each of the last two years and could double annually over the next five years.
Social networking sites on mobile devices and mobile broadband-based PCs account for an increasing portion of mobile data traffic, said Ericsson.
It found that over 200 mobile operators in 60 countries are deploying and promoting Facebook mobile products, with over 100 million active users accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
In recent consumer survey of 4,580 respondents in six mature markets, Ericsson found that a mobile broadband connection had become as personal as the mobile phone, with 80% of respondents saying they would not share their laptop. Another 65% of said they would not share their mobile broadband connection.