I know this is a little bit late but the company who compiled the statistics, Ericsson, just released the data. It turns out that in December 2009 mobile data traffic took up more bandwidth than voice traffic. Ericsson’s numbers show that the crossover between data and voice occurred at 140,000 terabytes per month. That’s the first time it has ever happened. Ericsson compiled the data based on measurements from live networks around the world.
According to Ericsson mobile data traffic grew 280% globally during the last two years and is forecast to double every year for the next five years. During that same period 3G traffic was also measured as surpassing 2G data traffic which is not surprising. The bigger the pipe the more you can and will pull down.
The main downside of this growth is that it looks like carriers will be moving towards tiered mobile broadband pricing in the future where you pay for what you use. I always dreamed that those days were over when I paid T-Mobile $10 a month for 1Mb of data transfer on my t68i. I just hope we don’t go way back to the days where you paid AOL and Prodigy by the hour for internet usage…
