Vodafone reveal continued increase in data usage

A trading update? That’s normally quite a dry document and not one we’d feature here on Coolsmartphone, but the latest one from Vodafone has a number of pretty interesting points.

Amongst mentions of “Q1 organic service revenue” and “acceleration in AMAP”, it also shows that data traffic has grown quite substantially. The figures show that for Q1 European data usage increased by 59% and…

In absolute terms, the growth in traffic during the quarter was equivalent to our total quarterly data traffic just two years ago.

That’s a pretty big uptick in data usage. The network also reveals that 4G adoption and larger data allowances mean that each customer is using on average 1.8GB of data per month – up 39%. Some 67% of the data traffic in Europe is now on 4G. The company says that this technology is “substantially more cost efficient than 3G”.

What’s taking up this data? Well, 60% of the traffic is “video, social and audio applications” across Europe.

Further details can be found here, but it’s interesting to see that data usage is climbing so rapidly and our thirst for streaming audio and video is increasing.