Back in July, DNA/Elisa of Finland reported that their average user consumes 5 GB of data per month.
Personally I don’t do a lot of video streaming while I’m on LTE so my current data consumption on my smartphone is around 1.5 GB a month these days, so you can imagine how much streaming must be going on in Finland.
Even more seems to have been used in August during the Olympics. MobileEuorpe reports an exceptional DNA/Elisa mobile data use of 13 GB per user last month. That makes me wonder how networks are coping!? According to the picture in the first link, Swedish users are also consuming quite a lot of mobile data but nowhere near users in Finland. And still, even though the network I used in Finland had 50 MHz of LTE on air, speeds during evening hours were down from 40 Mbit/s during the daytime (my UE was not CA capable…) down to single digits in the evening.
I was checking my own consumption on Android when reading this article to compare: I am consuming up to 30GB per month on LTE. I was almost at this level on 3G before and I see that with LTE the improved experience makes me use up my quota more quickly.
1. 70% of this comes from YouTube or TV channels apps and radio. Effectively I am not watching traditional TV anymore but stream TV programs on demand.
2. Then comes Chrome and Facebook, I assume this is because I am playing videos embedded in articles or Facebook posts.
3. Then, Google Play is consuming 700 MB of data to do apps updates which is ridiculously high. The frequency and weight of apps updates is becoming costly for whoever is not on an unlimited plan.
I think even 5GB is quite high. This is on par with what they consume in Korea see this link http://www.netmanias.com/en/?m=view&id=blog&no=10326 ?(at the bottom of the coverage maps). I am also assuming this figure only captures what people consume on the mobile network, but I guess most people consume much more when connected on wi-fi at home, work etc. 13GB on average the mobile network is ridiculous! They must have some good data plans.