Connectivity · Mobile Traffic
Global Mobile Data Traffic
Traffic to phones more than tripled in five years, and video is most of it.
- ~100× since 2013
- Traffic doubled in 2018 (India/Jio surge)
- Video is 76% of the total (end-2025)
- Phones only: excludes fixed wireless
Global mobile data traffic, meaning the data flowing to and from phones and other mobile devices, reached 146 exabytes per month at the end of 2025, up from 48 EB per month at the end of 2020: a factor of about 3.0 in five years, and about a quarter more each year. One exabyte is a billion gigabytes. Video is the engine, 76% of the total at the end of 2025, as YouTube, TikTok, Netflix and Instagram moved onto phones and 4G then 5G made streaming routine everywhere. Two honest caveats sit behind these numbers. The figure excludes Fixed Wireless Access, which is home and office broadband delivered over the cellular network rather than to a phone; including FWA, total mobile-network traffic was 203 EB per month in 2025. And while the ITU measures global traffic too, on its own different taxonomy, Ericsson publishes the only continuous annual series on this basis, so every point here is a December reading of one series from one vintage: the June 2026 Mobility Report, taken from the underlying unrounded data in Ericsson’s own Mobility Visualizer. The series starts in 2013 because that is where Ericsson’s own annual history starts; the only earlier global measure, Cisco’s VNI, was discontinued in 2018 and is not spliced on.
| Year | Value | Note | Projected |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 1.4 EB/month | ||
| 2014 | 2.5 EB/month | ||
| 2015 | 4.3 EB/month | ||
| 2016 | 7.2 EB/month | ||
| 2017 | 11 EB/month | ||
| 2018 | 22 EB/month | India/Jio surge: traffic doubles in one year | |
| 2019 | 33 EB/month | ||
| 2020 | 48 EB/month | ||
| 2021 | 69 EB/month | ||
| 2022 | 88 EB/month | ||
| 2023 | 106 EB/month | ||
| 2024 | 123 EB/month | ||
| 2025 | 146 EB/month | 146 EB/month (203 incl. fixed wireless) |