05 April 2024

Some 18 months on from 5G’s launch in India, it’s been reported that 5G users consume some 3.6 times more data than 4G users.It has also led to a growth in overall data consumption.

Over the last five years, mobile data traffic in India expanded at a 26% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) to reach 17.4 EB per month in 2023. One of the major contributors to the growth in data consumption is 5G at no additional cost coupled with unlimited data. With time, as more people upgrade to 5G phones and when 5G is rolled out in more towns and cities, the overall data consumption will increase further still.

According to Nokia’s latest Mobile Broadband Index (MBiT) report of 2024, 5G contributed 15% of all the data traffic in 2023, and, in the metro circles, had a 20% share in overall mobile data traffic. For every 5GB of data consumed, 1GB was 5G.

Nokia reports that approximately 17% of active 4G devices in India, 134 million out of 796 million, are 5G capable. The numbers would rise as people upgrade to 5G devices in the coming months and years. The average monthly data traffic per user also surged by 24% year-on-year in 2023, reaching 24.1GB per user per month.