Asia-Pacific Leads the World in Mobile Traffic Consumption

The way we use mobile phones has changed significantly over the past few years. Since the introduction of the first iPhone in 2007, more and more online activities have gradually been shifted to smartphones, leading to ever-growing mobile data consumption.

Mobile phone users from the Asia-Pacific region have the highest data needs on average. They consume an average of 1.1 gigabytes per month, with half of them using more than 336 megabytes.

The lowest data consumption can be observed in Africa, where the average mobile phone user consumes just 21MB of data per month. The explanation for this is quite straight forward, as smartphone penetration is much lower in Africa than in other parts of the world. While many Africans use their mobile phones to perform financial transactions, most of them still rely on feature phones which consume very little data.

Note: The median is the value that separates the sample in half, i.e. half of the sample population consume less data than the median and half of the sample consume more data than the median. The mean represents the average data consumption across the whole sample.