Data consumption by Indian mobile users has been increasing year over year, with a new report from TRAI saying that mobile users in the country have already consumed 55 million terabytes of data in 2019, and the year isn’t even over yet.
That’s a significant jump of 36% over the 46 million terabytes of data consumed by Indians in 2018. TRAI’s report mentioned data usage in 2014, 2018, and so far in 2019, and said “The volume of total wireless data usage increased from 828 million GB during the year 2014 to 46,404 million GB during the year 2018-19. The wireless data usage in the year 2019 is expected to surpass the previous year usage by a significant margin as reflected by usage of 54,917 million GB till September 2019”
The reasons behind this surge in data usage can be broadly broken down into two factors, one being the adoption of LTE technology by Indian telecom operators over the last few years, with faster data speeds being a major reason driving the increasing data usage in the country.
Other than that, the reduction of tariffs for mobile internet, driven by Jio when it first launched back in 2015, has made high-speed internet available to more people in the country, and in larger quantities than ever before. Add to that the launch of the Jio Phone which brought 4G internet to the hands of millions who didn’t have a smartphone prior to Reliance Jio’s revolutionary feature-phone, and it’s easy to see why the data consumption in the country has been on a steady rise over the years.
