Americans Used Record 100 Trillion Megabytes of Wireless Data In 2023 (reuters.com) 81
A new survey released on Tuesday found that Americans used over 100 trillion megabytes of wireless data last year -- a 36% increase from the previous year and the largest single-year increase in the history of wireless data consumption. Reuters reports: The increase -- 26 trillion MBs over 2022 -- comes as a growing number of 5G wireless devices are being used, said wireless industry association CTIA that represents major wireless carriers like Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and technology firms. The total number of wireless connections rose to 558 million last year, up 6% over 2022, the survey found.
Demand for spectrum use is soaring, driven in part by more wireless use in advancements including drones, self-driving vehicles, space missions and precision agriculture. The survey said the number of minutes Americans spent talking on the phone fell slightly from 2.5 trillion in 2022 to 2.4 trillion in 2023 and text messages were about the same at 2.1 trillion in 2023 over the prior year.
Demand for spectrum use is soaring, driven in part by more wireless use in advancements including drones, self-driving vehicles, space missions and precision agriculture. The survey said the number of minutes Americans spent talking on the phone fell slightly from 2.5 trillion in 2022 to 2.4 trillion in 2023 and text messages were about the same at 2.1 trillion in 2023 over the prior year.
Data Consumption (Score:5, Interesting)
.... in the history of wireless data consumption
There is no such thing as "data use" or "data consumption". Nothing is being "used". Nothing is being "consumed". The term "data consumption" is the bullshit lie used by the telecom oligopoly to justify their obscenely high prices.
And nothing of value... (Score:1)
...was transmitted.
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Tell us you didn't read the summary without telling us you didn't read the summary.
People like you who don't have a sufficient attention span to read a couple short paragraphs bode ill for the future.
Where in the summary does it say otherwise? Did you think this was it:
Demand for spectrum use is soaring, driven in part by more wireless use in advancements including drones, self-driving vehicles, space missions and precision agriculture.
That's about spectrum use; Not about wireless data usage.
The overwhelming majority of data usage is video. Has been for a long time. Has been an increasing proportion thereof for a long time. Where do you see otherwise?
"People like you..." SMDH
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Re: And nothing of value... (Score:2)
USA!! USA!!!
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I guess you're perfectly content with dialup then? Since nothing is "used" when bandwidth comes into question.
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I willed my connection at home to run at 100 Gbps, but it doesn't seem to be changing. Can you tell me what I'm doing wrong?
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Actually that is it not true. To send data you have to remove entropy to create the signal, so you are creating more entropy somewhere else.
As for data consumption, the term bandwidth consumption is probably more accurate. You can only send so much data over a given system, so that capacity is the limit they are talking about.
Data consumption ... (Score:1)
... is silverfish in an old government-data-repository library full of old books containing old records.
Re: Data Consumption (Score:2)
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Re: Data Consumption (Score:2)
Like lanes on a freeway or landing slots at a busy airport, use it or lose it.
Re: Data Consumption (Score:2)
Re: Data Consumption (Score:2)
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There is no such thing as "data use" or "data consumption". Nothing is being "used". Nothing is being "consumed".
Tell that to my Netflix stream. The data comes all the way over the line and then what? It isn't saved anywhere.
consume:
verb
1. Use up a resource.
though number 2 here also applies:
2. Buy goods or services.
So really data is being consumed in 2 different ways.
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NSA, In unrelated news... (Score:2)
In unrelated news, NSA stored 100 Trillion Megabytes of new Data In 2023
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Also for those that don't know, 100 Trillion Megabytes is playing with the decimal point. It's 100 Terabytes.
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>> 100 Trillion Megabytes is playing with the decimal point. It's 100 Terabytes.
Nope. It just is not.
10^12 * 10^6 = 10^18 -> 100 Exabytes
And that is assumming Trillion = 10^12
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Bandwidth is a finite resource. There is an amount of data above which you would not be able to transmit in a single year given the current network's capabilities. 100T MB is some fraction of that capacity, thus the bandwidth was "consumed".
I was hoping for something I could visualize (Score:5, Funny)
Like how many Olympic sized swimming pools, or Eiffel towers end to end, or elephants stacked on top of each other. But no, just trillions of megabytes. How am I ever going to visualize such a number???
Re:I was hoping for something I could visualize (Score:5, Funny)
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For the younger slashdotters who don't remember station wagons, there were like minivans, only not as tall, and a lot of them had fake wood panels covering the outside.
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For the younger readers who don't remember DVDs (Score:1)
They were like thumb drives, only flatter, round, and it took close to 100 to carry as much data as a modern thumb drive.
For the very young readers who don't remember thumb drives, ask your parents.
Re: For the younger readers who don't remember DVD (Score:1)
How many punch cards is that again?
Re: For the younger readers who don't remember DVD (Score:4, Funny)
How many punch cards is that again?
African or European?
Re: For the younger readers who don't remember DVD (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's an image of 5 mb in punch cards. So we need 20 trillion of these, but we'd run out of ladies to put next to it for scale.
https://community.spiceworks.c... [spiceworks.com]
Re: For the younger readers who don't remember DVD (Score:5, Interesting)
How many punch cards is that again?
That would be a stack as tall as, lets see...
... at least 15 round trips to Pluto.
But let's lay them out end to end:
Almost 3 round trips to Alpha Centauri.
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I visualize 95% of that data being used for utter useless crap.
I was going for 99.44% (Score:1)
But you are right, it's probably closer to 95% totally-useless crap and 4.44% marginally-useful crap.
Old School Visualization (Score:2)
Re: Old School Visualization (Score:1)
Pulled by a Baldwin steam engine?
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Re:I was hoping for something I could visualize (Score:5, Informative)
But no, just trillions of megabytes.
The proper term for a trillion megabytes (a quintillion bytes) is "exabyte".
But most people don't know what that is.
How am I ever going to visualize such a number???
Visualize it per person.
There are 330 million Americans, so 100 trillion megabytes is 300 gigabytes per person.
That's roughly one standard-definition movie per person per day.
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The most obvious unit to use would be gigabytes, since that's what most people's wireless data contracts are measured in.
Less Impressive (Score:2)
The proper term for a trillion megabytes (a quintillion bytes) is "exabyte".
So you can visualize that as 100 Exabyte tapes - it's much less impressive now!
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The proper term for a trillion megabytes (a quintillion bytes) is "exabyte".
So you can visualize that as 100 Exabyte tapes - it's much less impressive now!
HA! Well played!
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Data is better visualized in STASI Cabinets.
Have a look here :
https://opendatacity.github.io... [github.io]
Trillions of megabytes (Score:3)
Trillions of megabytes, huh? Too bad there isn't a more convenient unit we could use.
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I guess 100,000 terabytes didn't sound as impressive. IMO it really doesn't when you consider the number of devices and the 5G home internet offerings.
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I guess 100,000 terabytes didn't sound as impressive. IMO it really doesn't when you consider the number of devices and the 5G home internet offerings.
Definitely not as impressive sounding as 100 exabytes, literally and figuratively.
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Yeap, and using bytes or bits would have probably made the title too long like "millions of trillions of bytes" or something so they settled for MB for maximum efficiency while retaining maximum click baity and using a unit (trillion) which most users are used to hear about and which sounds really big.
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Trillions of megabytes, huh? Too bad there isn't a more convenient unit we could use.
Exabyte Corporation's founders were waaaay ahead of the curve on metric prefixes back in 1985.
I guess they figured "Hey, an exabyte should be enough for anybody."
Of course, they never got anywhere close to 1 EB capacity on a tape.
100 EB of wireless data compares well, though, to the ~150 EB (compressed) total capacity of all storage tapes shipped last year.
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Would you prefer the number of 140 Kb Apple II floppy disks? Or 1.44 Mb 3.5" floppy disks? The capacity of hard disks is too variable to make a good measure.
Earth masses of 3.5 floppy disks, there is a neat unit.
Re:More convenient unit? (Score:1)
Jizz's, most used for porn.
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Gigaquads? (Score:2)
How much was Ads? (Score:5, Funny)
Subtract that off and we get a better measure of "useful" data.
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Funny joke, but the reality is virtually none of it. All the ads sent to you over the internet are a tiny pittance in comparison to you watching a single movie on Netflix.
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This is marked funny, but the question makes a damn fine point. Examples:
If I'm watching a TV show on Amazon Prime or a long-form educational video (45 min), I expect at least 4 commercial breaks of at a max. of 3 minutes each for a total of 12 minutes of ads per selected video. That's a significant amount of data and usually for ads that I don't actually care about.
The Google News smartphone app used to be the super-light smartphone app to serve news without paywalls or a ton of ads, but now there are high
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Best Funny but not funny.
Joking aside, how much is technical bloat? (Score:2)
How much of that data is things like full (vs differential) app/OS upgrades?
How much is from downloading apps that are built in a non-space-efficient way?
How much is from downloading entire suites of apps when I just needed one part?
How much is from downloading full games with the entire media content when large parts of that content are only seen by a small fraction of players?
How much is streaming media that is downloaded at a resolution/quality far higher than the receiving device - or average listener's
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How much is malware spreading itself or doing whatever its bad thing is?
(My household 2-cellphone plan is 20G per month. My wife's android phone has been using nearly all of it. This month it ran through it in two weeks. WTF?)
Yes, but to be fair, most of it was (Score:2)
calls to three different Javascript frameworks bouncing back and forth a dozen times just to load each menu item...
Sorry (Score:1)
Sorry about that. I left the Netflix preview screen looping since the pandemic.
A lot of that was surveillance data (Score:2)
Gotta feed the AI and keep the advertisers advertising.
Meaningless metric (Score:2)
Just counting how many MB in total is meaningless. What is useful are metrics like these:
Number of Americans having a mobile plan, breakdown by 2/3/4/5G.
Average data usage per customer, aggregate and also grouped by 2/3/4/5G.
Average data cap of 2/3/4/5G plans.
And then compare these metrics with other countries.
100 petabytes (Score:1)
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100 trillion megabytes (100 * 10^12 * 10^6) is 100 * 10^18 bytes, or 100 exabytes, FWIW.
make sense (Score:2)
I can understand this. I rarely bother myself to switch mt phone from mobile data to Wi-Fi, even at home. Not even if I have to update a few apps. And as an European, not even when traveling to other EU countries. This while my subscription is 2€/month.
100 Exabytes or a 100 Million TBs /terrabytes (Score:2)
100 Exabytes or a 100 Million TBs /terrabytes
so 100 Mn of 1 TB SSDs for 400 Mn people. Each is using 250 GB. Over the whole year. So basically 1 GB per day per person?
Not had coffee yet so it could be off by several magnitudes i guess
so 100 exabytes then (Score:1)
Not even buying their reasons.... (Score:2)
Honestly? The #1 biggest reason they'd see a surge in cellular data usage in recent years, IMO, is the proliferation of home broadband solutions using the cellular LTE or 5G network.
In my city, for example? It used to be, unless you wanted absolutely terrible 6mbit DSL service, your only option besides satellite for high-speed Internet was Spectrum cable. With them having 2 full day long outages in the entire city in just the last couple weeks? A lot of people are fed up with their high prices and unreliabi
Only 10 of which is useful (Score:2)
Based on the 90% Bullshit Rule of the Internet, 90 trillion of it is garbage.