Mobile Traffic, Connections, and Network Speeds—Oh My!

The GSMA, which is a mobile operator industry group, released a beefy report this week on the state of the mobile economy that is nicely designed and, more importantly, chock-full of interesting tidbits.

Among the more salient stats:

Nearly half the world now uses cellphones–that’s 3.2 billion people–and the group expects another 700 million will be added over the coming years to bring this number past 4 billion in 2018. Not surprisingly, huge growth areas are expected to be in the Asia Pacific region, Africa, and Latin America.

There are many more mobile connections than cellphone users (lots of folks use more than one SIM): nearly seven billion in 2012. This is predicted to climb to nearly 10 billion in 2017.

While most mobile connections are currently over 2G networks (3G makes up a smaller piece of the pie and 4G just a sliver), in 2017, 2G networks will make up less than half while 3G and 4G rise to a combined 53 percent of the market. The group forecasts that, in 2017, one out of every five mobile broadband subscriptions will be for an LTE or other 4G high-speed network, up from one in 25 last year.

Mobile traffic in 2012 exceeded every other year combined, totaling 0.9 exabytes per month (each exabyte is equal to a billion gigabytes). In 2017, this is expected to climb to 11.2 exabytes per month.

Last year, revenue spent on the global “mobile ecosystem” totaled nearly $1.6 trillion–a figure expected to climb to nearly $2 trillion in 2017.