Telefónica Deutschland provides current statistics with an insight into the data consumption of around 44 million customers in the mobile network. Accordingly, the 1 exabyte (1 billion gigabyte) mark has been broken for the first time within six months. The network operator expects further growth of up to 60 percent per year.
1 exabyte is roughly the amount of data used globally across the Internet between 2003 and 2004, according to statistics from Cisco Systems. In Germany alone, Telefónica customers have used a comparable amount of data in the mobile network within six months. In 2019 the annual consumption was 1 exabyte for the first time, last year it was 1.51 exabytes.
Increase of up to 60 percent per year
The network operator justifies the increase in particular with the increasing popularity of music and video streaming as well as the sharing of photos and videos on social media or via messaging apps such as WhatsApp. Currently, data consumption is growing by around 50 to 60 percent per year, so that there are new record values month after month, explains Telefónica. The monthly data consumption of almost 178 million gigabytes at Telefónica 2015 was still used for the entire year.
30 percent 5G coverage by the end of 2021
Telefónica also provides current statistics on network expansion. The so-called “5G expansion turbo”, which Telefónica announced at the end of March, produced a total of 2,000 5G antennas at 3.6 GHz in 80 cities as of July 2. According to current planning, over 30 percent of the population should be supplied with 5G by the end of this year, and all of Germany by 2025. Telefónica expects a massive increase in data usage in the mobile network with the 5G expansion.
More O2 tariffs with 5G support
< p class = "p text-width"> Since the end of June, the Telefónica brand O2 has been supporting the 5G standard with more mobile phone tariffs. New additions are the O2 Free M with up to 300 instead of 225 Mbit/s in the downlink and the O2 Free Unlimited Basic with 2 Mbit/s in the downlink.