Mobile data traffic outlook

Total global mobile data traffic – excluding traffic generated by Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) – is expected to grow by a factor of around 2.3 to reach 280 EB per month in 2030. When FWA is included, total mobile network data traffic is anticipated to grow by a factor of around 2.6, rising to 430 EB per month by the end of the forecast period. This is a slight reduction to our network traffic volume forecast up to 2030, compared to our estimate 6 months ago, based on new incoming data points from major markets. 5G’s share of mobile data traffic reached 35 percent at the end of 2024, increased from 26 percent at the end of 2023. This share is forecast to grow to 80 percent in 2030.

Factors that can impact the traffic

Mobile data traffic growth can be highly volatile and vary significantly between years, regions, markets and service providers, depending on local market dynamics. Factors that could impact traffic growth include:

• The pace of subscriber migration to later generations in populous markets like India, Latin America, South East Asia and Africa.
• The uptake rate of new devices, such as those built for augmented reality (AR), and scalable, multimodal generative AI (GenAI) applications.[1] The current predicted traffic growth up to 2030 includes an assumption that an initial uptake of extended reality (XR)-type services, including AR, VR and mixed reality (MR), will happen in the latter part of the forecast period. However, if adoption is accelerated, data traffic could significantly surpass our current traffic outlook at the end of the forecast period.
• Changes to the split between FWA and mobile data traffic when FWA connections grow. With continued strong FWA uptake in parts of the world where fixed broadband connections have been limited, it is likely that household-based traffic will move from smartphones to FWA – especially for streaming services.
• Tariff plans and available services.
• Continued improvements in the performance of deployed networks.
• Smartphone shipment development.
• Global macroeconomic changes such as inflation and interest rates, causing a significant impact on consumer willingness to pay for mobile services and affecting mobile data usage.

The growth in mobile data traffic per smartphone can be attributed to several drivers: improved device capabilities, affordable service plans, increased time spent consuming services, an increase in data-intensive content and growth in data consumption due to continued improvements in deployed network performance.

There are significant variations in monthly data consumption within all regions, with some individual countries and service providers having considerably higher or lower consumption than the regional averages.

As traffic demand varies across regions and over time, it is important to keep in mind that average monthly data traffic growth in a region cannot be used to estimate daily peak traffic growth in a local area, or to support network evolution strategies there.

Traffic patterns differ by location

Insights from an analysis of data traffic growth and patterns across different location types in some North American and European networks can be found in the previously published article, “Exploring how traffic patterns drive network evolution”.[2] The key findings include:

• Traffic growth is not universal across locations within a service provider’s network. For example, in a dense urban location traffic demands can be up to 1,000 times larger relative to rural areas.
• More services now require uplink performance to be considered, which typically makes up a larger portion of the traffic in dense urban locations. This will become even more critical for new uplink-demanding services like AI and XR.