US Wireless Data Traffic Going Ludicrous
It’s not like we didn’t see it coming, wireless data is the current wave of the future. And the US is on track to surpass the exabyte mark. *Side note* Google Chrome does not recognize “exabyte” as word, in fact it only goes to “gigabyte”. So what is an exabyte? An exabyte is a 1 with 18 zeros on the end; for comparisons sake, a gigabyte is a 1 with nine zeros tagged on the end. If you went to the wiki page I linked, it has an interesting comparison for exabyte:
…all words ever spoken by human beings could be stored in approximately 5 exabytes of data…
It also notes that “one exabyte is equivalent to 50,000 years of DVD quality video”. Yep, in one year the US alone is on track to move that much data through their wireless carriers. Snap.
Here’s a pretty picture painted in Excel for you to look at:
Here are some wireless stats that I pilfered from GigaOM:
* In Q3 2010, 47% of the devices sold in the US were smartphones compared to 24% globally.
* The US Wireless data service revenues grew 7% Q/Q to $14B in Q310.
* Verizon and AT&T accounted for 85% of the increase in data revenues in Q3 2010.
* Per month data (blended) ARPU – Sprint $18.7 (estimated), Verizon $18.61, AT&T $17.35, T-Mobile – $12 (estimated), average $16.7
* Nearly 21 percent of T-Mobile USA subscribers are on the smartphone.
* Data now accounts for about 33 percent of total ARPU for carriers in the US. Sharma predicts that in 2013, one should expect data and voice revenues to be roughly equal for the US carriers.
[via GigaOM]