Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Americans Used Nearly 10 Trillion Megabytes of Mobile Data Last Year (washingtonpost.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the throttled-data dept.

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.

12 of 91 comments (clear)

  1. Whatever happened to by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Petabytes?

    1. Re:Whatever happened to by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      What happened to petabytes? Exabytes.

      10 trillion million is 10*10^12*10^6=10*10^18. (Kilo=10^3, mega=10^6, giga=10^9, tera=10^12, peta=10^15, exa=10^18)

    2. Re:Whatever happened to by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

      You need to think volumetrically, where the standard is the 40 foot intermodal shipping container. You can buy 4TB 2.5" HDDs, which are about 6 cubic inches. A shipping container has 40x8x8 = 2560 ft^3 or 4423680 in^3. So it would hold 737,280 2.5" HDDs, or just shy of 3 exabytes. So the nearly 10 exabytes in TFA could fit in 3 standard intermodal containers. Or it would all fit in a medium sized house (cabling and cooling would take additional space). If you used 1TB SD cards (expensive, but available), you could cram it all into one container.

    3. Re:Whatever happened to by Darth+Twon · · Score: 2

      Ten Billion Gigabytes
      Ten Million Terabytes
      Ten Thousand Petabytes
      Ten Exabytes.

      0.01 Zettabytes

      --
      Take this sig and smoke it.
  2. Does that title reflect consumer society or what? by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  3. 9EB? by Arkh89 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Only 9EB?
    That doesn't sound like much...

    1. Re:9EB? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Funny

      Only 9EB?
      That doesn't sound like much...

      Indeed. I had an Exabyte tape drive back in the 1980s.

    2. Re:9EB? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      For comparison: Finland uses 0.6EB with 5 million residents, and Germany the same 0.6EB with 80 million. US has 320 million people, so it means that US uses roughly three to four times the data per capita compared to Germany. The Finns on the other hand use four to five times more data than the USians.

      https://twitter.com/tefficient/status/733578831433326592

    3. Re:9EB? by shawn2772 · · Score: 2

      Only 9EB? That doesn't sound like much...

      Indeed. I had an Exabyte tape drive back in the 1980s.

      Of course, that "Exabyte" drive could only hold 3.5 GB. You'd have needed some 2.6 trillion cartridges to store 9 EB. With modern tapes you could do it with only 41,000 cartridges.

  4. 10 trillion megabytes?! by TsuruchiBrian · · Score: 3, Funny

    That's like 10 billion gigabytes!!

  5. Re:Does that title reflect consumer society or wha by TsuruchiBrian · · Score: 2

    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).

  6. At 4% of capacity? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.