The top five countries with the highest mobile data usage are: Finland, Taiwan, Bahrain, Austria and Estonia. highest mobile data usage country

Finland leads with an average mobile data usage per non-M2M SIM of 15.9 GB per month. 64% of the Finnish non M2M SIMs had unlimited data volume in December 2017.

The countries with the lowest data usage are Greece, Belgium and Germany.

The usage levels in these countries are now much lower than the two maturing markets China and India.

Mobile data usage per country highest mobile data usage country

India’s 303% growth in usage is unparallelled. It is a direct consequence of the market entry of a
new disruptive operator, Jio. But all of the growth isn’t attributed to Jio; the existing operators such as Airtel, Vodafone, and Idea increased their average data usage in 2017 many times when prices decreased and mobile networks improved.

Second-ranked Lithuania appears to have had very fast growth in data usage as well, but here we are facing a reporting comparability issue: Since January 2017, the Lithuanian regulator has included the traffic of the fixed-line substitution specialist Mezon. Their products used to be WiMax-based, but the company shifted to 2.3 GHz TDD LTE in 2016. Mezon’s traffic is not reported for 2016, hence the shown growth rate of 181% is exaggerated, but unclear how much.

China had a 152% growth in usage in 2017. In absolute terms, China’s mobile data traffic grew as fast as India’s in 2017: The Chinese and Indian networks, respectively, carried an incremental 15000 petabytes in 2017 compared to 2016.

Among the more mature markets, France stands out with its 110% growth in data usage.

The markets with the lowest growth in data usage in 2017 are Canada, Greece, the USA, Latvia, Hong Kong, and Sweden.

The reasons are different:

– For Canada and Greece, high operator revenues per gigabyte play a key role; see the revenue section of this analysis
– The position of the USA is surprising, as 2017 was the year when unlimited plans became widely available – but apparently, these have not led to any major increase in overall usage, perhaps due to the volume and video bandwidth limitations on these plans
– In Latvia, operators have scaled back on unlimited plans
– The operators of Hong Kong have built large public Wi-Fi networks that are offloading much of the mobile data traffic
– In Sweden, high-speed fiber-to-the-home and fiber-to-the-building networks are now widespread – 67% of the Swedish fixed broadband users subscribe to 100 Mbit/s or higher download speeds. highest mobile data usage country

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