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Sub-Saharan Africa mobile data to hit 800 petabytes a month

Mobile data traffic is on an exponential growth path, and according to telecommunications and infrastructure company Ericsson, Sub-Saharan Africa’s mobile data traffic is set to reach almost 800 petabytes a month by 2019.

According to the company’s Mobility Report for June 2014, that would indicate a 20-fold increase in mobile data traffic from here it is now, just under 50 petabytes a month.

“As the connected society becomes the norm, consumers and businesses are increasingly using devices such as smartphones and tablets as substitute or complementary tools in everyday tasks. The growing usage of these devices for a multitude of tasks, and consumers’ freedom to move from one screen to the next, means mobile traffic will significantly increase in the coming years,” Ericsson said in the report.

A big contributor to mobile traffic, according to Ericsson, is social networks. Their study found that 74 percent of Sub-Saharan social network users send messages to friends, 62 percent check their friends’ updates, while 46 percent upload photos/videos to social media and 15 percent stream content from mobile platforms.

“Such activities will have a ripple effect on the growth of mobile traffic – specifically data traffic – as the concept of sharing evolves. The growing consumption of viral content over mobile devices is a good example of this,” it said.

To compound the issue of a growing number of mobile subscribers and the ailing infrastructure of some countries’ telecommunications network, mobile data traffic is set to grow by about 20 times between 2013 and the end of 2019. This is in comparison to the 10-fold growth that will occur globally for the same time.

“Mobile operators and relevant ICT stakeholders, including governments, must drive the development of appropriate infrastructure to handle the growing traffic demand on networks. The increase in affordable smartphones in Sub-Saharan Africa’s mobile market will contribute to a rise in 3G and 4G technologies and a subsequent increase in subscriptions,” Ericsson postulated.

[Source – Ericsson, image – Flickr Creative Commons by Johan Larsson]

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