People Aren’t Just Buying Smartphones, They Are Using Them, Too

Datacenter

The headlines are flooded with the latest figures on how many smartphones were sold in the past quarter (Smartphones represented 19 percent of all phones shipped, according to Garner). But people aren’t just buying smartphones for fun, they are using them to connect to the internet and access tons of data, reports Ericsson. The Swedish network infrastructure company said today that mobile data traffic tripled over the past year and is growing 10 times faster than voice — even after we hit the major milestone back in December when data exceeded voice for the first time.

Still, there’s a lot of growth in the pipeline with only 10 percent of mobile subscriptions capable of using mobile broadband.

When adding it all up, today Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC) estimates that there’s more than five billion mobile subscriptions worldwide using nearly 225,000 terabytes of data a month as of the second quarter.

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