Met with EE last week. Discovered that in the early days of their 4G network rollout a significant chunk of the bandwidth usage was people doing speed tests. Bit like me. I’ve racked up around 6GB between O2 and Vodafone and more when taking into consideration the Huaweii MiFi with the EE SIM.
A pal of mine told me that last week he had already used up his 8GB bundle for September and had to buy more. He hadn’t been doing 4G testing but had been watching movies. It’s the shape of things to come. I’ll see if I can find some bandwidth usage trend stats for 4G and maybe we can extrapolate to see how much data we are going to be using in say 2 years time. Problem is there isn’t enough data specifically on 4G yet.
One interesting aspect of the meeting with EE was that they have no plans to introduce unlimited packages on 4G. Like it or not this is the only sensible approach in the near term when network capacity is still fairly expensive.
It’s too early to tell which of the operators is going to have the best 4G network.
One reply on “Mobile data usage growth when using 4G networks”
We haven’t even got decent 2G yet, let alone 3 or 4G.
What do you think will happen when folk realise 4G is faster than most landline connections?
Do you think the cells will be able to cope with the increased traffic or will the tariff keep usage down?