The amount of information being transmitted wirelessly is growing at an enormous rate. Gartner has predicted that, between 2012 and 2017, mobile data traffic used globally each month will increase from 0.9 to 11.2 exabytes. This consumption of data is being led by the consumer market, but businesses are rapidly following suit.

Average mobile data use in North America nearly doubled in 2013 to 1.38 GBs a month leading the world. The U.S. isn’t the biggest data hog — that would be Japan — but LTE is driving consumption. North America led the pack with the average mobile subscriber consuming 1.38 GBs a month, up from 752 MBs in 2012 and a full gigabyte more than the average global usage of 356 MBs. When looking at individual countries, Japanese users led the world with 1.87 GBs, followed by the U.S. at 1.41 GBs and South Korea with 1.25 GBs.  Smartphone adoption remains significantly lower in the business environment than in the consumer market. The resultant growth of ‘bring-your-own-device’ (BYOD) strategies are driving rapid growth in this area.

Forward-thinking companies are now embracing a bigger vision of mobility, which is transforming the way they use mobile data both internally and in offering services or products to customers. This greater reliance on cloud-based systems and remote working is driving the migration of data traffic away from traditional fixed LAN environments to a mobile infrastructure, such as LTE-Advanced networks.