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Americans Used Nearly 10 Trillion Megabytes of Mobile Data Last Year (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A report from CTIA released Monday found that consumers have nearly doubled their consumption of mobile data last year. It found that last month, consumers chugged down 804 billion megabytes of data, which adds up to a total of 9.65 billion gigabytes. The numbers are especially significant when compared to previous years. "From December 2013 to December 2014, U.S. data consumption grew by about 26 percent. But over the following year, it grew by 137 percent," writes Washington Post. YouTube and Netflix account for over half of North American internet traffic at peak hours, according to the networking equipment firm Sandvine. That figure spikes to 70 percent when streaming audio is part of the mix. The wireless industry as a result raked in nearly $200 billion last year alone, which is a 70 percent jump compared to a decade ago. The numbers are likely to rise as more and more devices become connected to the internet. With news of films from Disney, Marvel, Lucasfilm and Pixar coming to Netflix this September, we're likely to see mobile data use increase even more this year.
Sorry. I pirate a lot of content with my phone.
Petabytes?
Forget petabytes, how much is this in libraries of congress.
that comes to...... :inputting data:
my calculator just overflowed.
gee thanks. lets just call it a hell of a lot of money. enough to wipe the u.s. national debt.
Americans didn't "use" 10 trillion megabytes of data, they exchanged them.
Mobile carriers however like people to think they "use" data because then they can charge for usage more easily.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Only 9EB?
That doesn't sound like much...
That is just 1 exabyte. But how much in football field units? Anyone?
In measuring with proper units, it's really just 10 million terabytes. *yawn*
That's like 10 billion gigabytes!!
If only they could make people accept being charged for exchanging data...
Half of the traffic is Youtube and Netflix. That's right. Not porn. Not piracy. It has turned into basic cable. Also, 10 trillion megabytes is 10 exabytes.
My $10/mo cell phone plan includes 50MB of data, but I rarely use more than 3-4 MB.
So we could have used lots lots more.
Only because we weren't allowed to use more. Artificial limitations and all
Why not? People should be able to understand there's an infrastructure to put in place and maintain for the data transfers to occur.
What I meant was, when you make people think about moving data in terms of using up that data, then it becomes easy to rape their wallets, because people instinctively have this feeling that they consume something that's being lost - which isn't what's happening at all.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Thats weird. I have 1Gbps here in downtown Seattle. 1Gbps. So fast.
I guess that's cool, but I am not surprised considering how much data is flying around now. Now I am still at shock and awe how I was able to download gigabytes of data back in the late 90s when I had only a 56k modem... damn I must have been a patient teenager.
The title was just a hook so you read the slashvertisement for Netflix.
In a technically rational world, the last mile would be almost entirely wireless, with P2P cache support for highly popular viral content. The fiber backbones would only run to broadcast distances, though most of the mobile devices would use variable power transmitters so that local wireless bandwidth would remain constant even as device density increased.
We can't have that for several reasons:
1. Governments want to control the distribution of all information and such wireless networks would be hard to control or censor.
2. Companies want to create monopoly profits no matter what the technology can deliver.
3. No one else matters.
As it applies in Japan, NTT has designed an excellent LTE wireless solution that could support wireless last mile, but they don't sell it that way primarily to push fire to the home, which for most homes is just crazy. What NTT chooses to sell is 7 GB per month, which would be exhausted in a few minutes if you actually use the bandwidth LTE offers. For the sake of profit maximization, the other big players agree to play by NTT's rules, and the government has no interest in breaking up the scam.
I need a tattoo on my forehead: Additional detailed suggestions available upon polite request.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Something *is* being lost. Every packet transmitted for you is a packet that could not be transmitted for someone else. When you rent a car, you don't consumer the car (well you kind of do through wear and tear but ignoring that), but you are still consuming a resource, which is the use of that car.
This is different than a television broadcast, for example, where you receiving the television broadcast does not prevent anyone else from receiving the broadcast. It is not consuming a resource (at least not until line of sight access to the tower becomes a limited resource).
When we speak of REST services and such, we say that we "consume" data. So when the bill shows up, why change the wording?
Americans didn't "use" 10 trillion megabytes of data, they exchanged them.
Mobile carriers however like people to think they "use" data because then they can charge for usage more easily.
I suspect 9 trillion of those megabytes was advertisements.
In addition, it was probably the least productive data use ever.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Why not? People should be able to understand there's an infrastructure to put in place and maintain for the data transfers to occur.
What I meant was, when you make people think about moving data in terms of using up that data, then it becomes easy to rape their wallets, because people instinctively have this feeling that they consume something that's being lost - which isn't what's happening at all.
If advertisers think that adblockers are bad now - just wait till they try that trick. I'm really curious what most people pay - I stay within my cap - usually - and it takes almost nothing to hit it. A few webpages and boom there's the message from Verizon.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
"YouTube and Netflix account for over half of North American internet traffic at peak hours, according to the networking equipment firm Sandvine. That figure spikes to 70 percent when streaming audio is part of the mix." Huh?
'Should be enough for anybody. (Sorry) (Ducks)
They certainly prevented it on my street. You have to get 60% of the area to vote yes to allow upgrades, and a nonvote counts as a no. With all of the rental units and empty houses under foreclosure, it's difficult to get that many people to vote, much less agree to having Comcast dig up the street and yards and to be able to install pedestals. It sucks living less than a 100 feet from cable, but still not being able to get it.
Go to centurylink.com and type in a few addresses from Seattle. You can find them by going to maps.google.com. I just did ten random residential addresses, and the fastest available connection I saw was 7 Mbps down/896 kbps up. You're full of crap.
Wave has it in a very limited area and CenturyLink only on a few streets. It is not widely available.
Should that be used, consumed, or merely facilitated the movement of ? It is not like we don't know where the data is, or the bandwidth is gone. No one was deprived of anything, unless you believe the MPAA in the fact that every bit of money out there that is not in their pocket must be because someone pirated something, and there by deprived them of their right to profit off of everything.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Looking around, I see that a 4G LTE cell tower can handle 100Mb/s in 3 different sectors for 300Mb/s total. According to http://www.statisticbrain.com/cell-phone-tower-statistics/, there are 205k cell towers in the US. If we assume each one supplies exactly one carrier with exactly one transceiver and that they're all 4G LTE, we'd average about 4.1% usage.
No wonder carriers charge for data, were at risk of hitting 5% of capacity.
Meanwhile in the glorious nation of Kazakhstan: http://s32.postimg.org/k1m6y13wl/P60229_033803.jpg 45GB 4g plan for ~$17 a month
Yep. Basically routers have limited memory, so when the queue for an outgoing interface gets full, what happens to packets? They get dropped. And adding more memory doesn't solve the problem because then you just get bigger backlogs. Packets will still get dropped at some point.
Also there's the nature of wireless transmission, which doesn't allow for collision detection. So wireless transmission uses collision avoidance. So when you're sending a packet, that's time when someone else couldn't send a packet. The way my teacher described the basic concept of wireless transmission is "playing with time".
I understand this is the equivalent of clickbait for /., but we already have a SI prefix to represent an amount this large.
I think 10 Exabytes would have conveyed the point, not some convoluted nomenclature like 10 trillion Megabytes >.>
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
or half a library of congress
I prefer to think of it as 20 quintillion nibbles.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eWEjvCRPrCo
Just rent a trencher and do it yourself when your neighbors are at work.
Came for the snarky comments regarding the inflated number in the headline, because why would a tech site use the proper prefix for a value. Headline: "MURICA Consumes Eleventy Billion PentaKilobytes. What they did with it next will blow your mind!
Half of them are cat videos.
Every packet transmitted for you is a packet that could not be transmitted for someone else.
Only when the network is operating at capacity. When the network is operating at less than capacity, every packet can be transmitted, meaning the opportunity cost of transmitting someone's packet is zero. The demand for the service of transmitting a packet is cyclic on a daily and weekly basis, lowest in the early mornings in a given time zone. Satellite carriers realize this and don't run the meter between, say, midnight and 5 AM (source: exede.com) So why do cellular carriers charge a flat rate for airtime regardless of demand?
I was under the impression that real estate ownership was a public record. Have you located the owner of each such rental unit? Have you located the bank owning each empty house under foreclosure? Have you informed them of the vote and polled them about how they plan to vote? What was their reply?
I assume "megabytes" was used because that's the unit in which carriers state their data transfer tariffs.
It has turned into basic cable.
But with the equivalent of a lot more public access channels than any basic cable operator has ever had.
Americans didn't "use" 10 trillion megabytes of data, they exchanged them.
Mobile carriers however like people to think they "use" data because then they can charge for usage more easily.
They exchanged data, but that does not mean they did not use it. After all, can you get back the data that was transmitted (in particular content in the streaming use case, because content is data)? This is like saying you exchange but not use signals when talking over a phone line.
No, I do in fact *use* data. Data comes from a sever, over the network, into my phone, where it is shown on the screen for a while. When I close that browser window that was showing that text or image or playing that song or movie, that data is *gone*.
Don't worry, though -- the server can make more upon request.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Telecom customers (and probably producers as well) as a whole are just not savvy enough to deal with a complicated pricing system
Back before the majority of postpaid cellular plans came with unlimited voice minutes, a lot of cellular carriers and landline long-distance companies offered discounts on night and weekend calls. Are telecom customers less tech savvy than they used to be?
Data comes from a sever, over the network, into my phone, where it is shown on the screen for a while. When I close that browser window that was showing that text or image or playing that song or movie, that data is *gone*.
I hope most of us here understand how incredibly sad that is.
I would say that voice calls were a little easier to deal with, which made more complicated rate plans feasible. Currently data can be transferred on your phone by apps that may be running in the background. Voice calls were never made without the customers knowledge, and logs of the data were kept and easy to understand. If there is a dispute over voice minutes, the telecom can produce a log showing phone numbers of the calls and how long they lasted. It is not really feasible or helpful to keep logs of every IP address and size of every packet transferred to/from your phone.
Currently data can be transferred on your phone by apps that may be running in the background.
Android logs the amount of data transferred by each app running on a device and lets the user sort a list of apps by decreasing data volume. Is this not enough?
Voice calls were never made without the customers knowledge
Almost never. (Search for butt dialing.)
It is not really feasible or helpful to keep logs of every IP address and size of every packet transferred to/from your phone.
So let me get this straight: Unlike satellite ISPs, cellular ISPs have failed to offer a reward for moving away from congested times of day, and you're rationalizing it as because the device communicates with more distinct destinations than when voice calls dominated cellular usage. Let me see if I can think of a way to interact with Internet data transfer accounting mechanisms already present in mobile operating systems.
Windows 8, Windows 10, and Android operating systems allow users to mark particular SSIDs as metered, and an application is expected to respect that by querying cost whenever it receives a notification of change in the device's Internet connection. I guess the real solution is for carriers to signal to a device when the connection has become unmetered or has become metered, so that applications can switch to more conservative download schedules.
Android logs the amount of data transferred by each app running on a device and lets the user sort a list of apps by decreasing data volume. Is this not enough?
I'm not saying that it's too complicated for software. I am saying that it's too complicated for the average customer. And it's not that they can't do it, it's just a question of whether the the added complexity for the customer is worth the increase in efficiency. I don't think telecoms want better efficiency (lower prices, higher profit) if it means a large portion of their customers are angry and frustrated.
So let me get this straight: Unlike satellite ISPs, cellular ISPs have failed to offer a reward for moving away from congested times of day, and you're rationalizing it as because the device communicates with more distinct destinations than when voice calls dominated cellular usage. Let me see if I can think of a way to interact with Internet data transfer accounting mechanisms already present in mobile operating systems.
I am not rationalizing anything. I am giving you what I think the reason is that telecoms have had different prices for voice for different times of the day, but not yet for data.
Windows 8, Windows 10, and Android operating systems allow users to mark particular SSIDs as metered, and an application is expected to respect that by querying cost [microsoft.com] whenever it receives a notification of change in the device's Internet connection. I guess the real solution is for carriers to signal to a device when the connection has become unmetered or has become metered, so that applications can switch to more conservative download schedules.
I am not saying it is technically impossible. I am saying that currently the benefits do not outweigh the costs in frustrated elderly customers. That will change when enough of the customers are savvy enough to understand data metering without needing to attend a class.
Even though it is inefficient, having a constant monthly price is simple, and there is a value to that.