U.S. Mobile Internet Traffic Nearly Doubled This Year

An anonymous reader sends this news from the NY Times Bits Blog: "Two big shifts happened in the American cellphone industry over the past year: Cellular networks got faster, and smartphone screens got bigger. In the United States, consumers used an average of 1.2 gigabytes a month over cellular networks this year, up from 690 megabytes a month in 2012, according to Chetan Sharma, a consultant for wireless carriers, who published a new report on industry trends on Monday. Worldwide, the average consumption was 240 megabytes a month this year, up from 140 megabytes last year, he said."

Comments

Ads?

[Animats]

What fraction of the increase was ads?

Re:Ads?

[Anonymous Coward]

What fraction of the increase was ads?

Even though ads might seem to be the obvious "consumer of bandwidth", ads are not the biggest consumer of bandwidth. Take some time to sit around an airport, bus, or train for a few hours and watch how people use their phones as "data devices". I don't mean watch them talk or text. I mean watch them. If they don't have their laptops tethered to their phones, they are probably watching video clips from "wherever". Why do they watch video clips on their phones, mostly phones with decent displays like iPhones and Galaxies, entertainment. Watch them watch a video for a few minutes. Then watch them scroll up, scroll down, perhaps enter new search criteria or browse another web site. They might find another video to watch for a few minutes or maybe a video to "share", either as a link to a friend or with someone sitting next to them.

If they are actually on a plane in flight, they may have stored a full length video on the phone, but that doesn't count against "data usage".

Before asking for citations, I cannot provide them as I am paid by cell phone companies to research this stuff for them.

Let me wish Verizon a Unhappy Christmas

[paiute]

Yes, this huge volume of traffic totally makes their overage charge of $1.99 per MEGABYTE if you go over your 2 GB monthly limit. Why do I fucking pay 15 dollars per gig for the first 2 and then 2 thousand dollars for the next one? Is it to lull me to sleep and then ram a huge charge up my ass? Because it feels like it.

Did I mention fuck Verizon? I went into a store, but the guy said there were no more iPhone 4s available anywhere. I should get a 5 - all the 4s had been sent back to Apple. Went home, found a 4s on the Verizons website for 99 cents. Do the stores and the website belong to the same organization? Because it doesn't feel like it.

The only bright spot about dealing with Verizon is the followup quality control call which lets you scream obscenities at the corporation for a few minutes.

Re:Let me wish Verizon a Unhappy Christmas

[PingXao]

That is their new business plan. Verizon is dumping all their old POTS copper wire business in regions where they (previously) offer landline service. They have stopped rolling out FiOS fiber-to-the-home pretty much everywhere. Their stated reasoning, believe it or not, is they can make more money on wireless overage charges. It's not a matter of POTS landlines and FiOS not being profitable. It's a matter of them not being profitable enough.

Re:Let me wish Verizon a Unhappy Christmas

[tepples]

You don't have to do business with Verizon, there are other cellular carriers

In a lot of places, it's either Verizon, no signal, no signal, or no signal.

Re:Let me wish Verizon a Unhappy Christmas

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't have to do business with Verizon, there are other cellular carriers

In a lot of places, it's either Verizon, no signal, no signal, or no signal.

You don't need to use Verizon to use Verizon towers. this page lists 9 companies which basically resell Verizon service. Many of these don't have Verizon's "hard" data cap. Many sell "unlimited" service with a "soft" cap. After the cap you are limited to 56k->ISDN type speeds, which sounds bad, until you realize that unless you stream music or video, a lot of what you would do on a phone would be passing only small amounts of data around.

Re:Let me wish Verizon a Unhappy Christmas

[Dragonslicer]

We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.

Crazy rates

[ls671]

consumers used an average of 1.2 gigabytes a month over cellular networks this year,

At current cellular network rates, it's a cash cow.

I'll wait until rates get lower a bit before I start using it. Eventually, it should be just about as low as wired connection rates. Just wait a few years yet.

Immigration

[tepples]

Would be quicker and cheaper to just move to another country.

Which country, and how would one go about qualifying for a visa?

Could've been 10 fold

[EzInKy]

It is only the cellular companies pricing models that are keeping this segment from exploding. And yes AT&T, I'm pointing the finger at you! You are still so stuck in a pricing model that wants to profit for each minute people spend communicating with each other. Perhaps another break up is needed?

Too expensive, capped, and slow.

[antdude]

I still don't own a mobile smartphone because of this. I want to have affordable one like landline uncapped fast ones.

Mobile internet traffic has doubled...thus

[Chas]

Carriers are trying to get their customers off old, grandfathered "unlimited" plans by offering nominal "savings" based on what they use NOW. Never mind that the usage is increasing rapidly...

Had my company's Sprint rep try that on us. We very politely told him to fuck the hell off.

64-bit

[dwater]

It's because people moved to using 64-bit instead of the old 32-bit. Right?