For the 14th time: tefficient’s famous data usage analysis – now covering 32 countries.
The mobile data usage continued to grow in 2016, but the growth rates varied much. Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong and Hungary grew the slowest whereas Lithuania, Turkey, Austria and Korea grew the fastest.
The data usage top list is dominated by operators that offer unlimited: The world leader [Finland’s DNA] had an average usage per SIM of 9.9 GB per month. Source: tefficient Industry analysis #5 2016
High penetration of data-only SIMs explains high data usage to a greater extent than 4G LTE. But it’s the effective revenue per Gbyte that matters most: In Finland, average usage was 13x that of the Netherlands – where operators effectively charged 14x more for a gigabyte than in Finland. Other expensive mobile data countries are Canada, Belgium, Germany and Czech Republic.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
