Australia Mobile Data Consumption: Growing, But Still Fairly Modest

The latest Internet Use, Australia report from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that although mobile data consumption is growing, usage still is not "high."


Apple iPhone and Android smart phone users consume a "trivially small amount of data." In fact, the study suggests that a typical user consumers a little over 135 megabytes a month, compared to the fixed broadband user’s 23 GBytes worth of average monthly appetite. 

Even users of mobile “dongles” consume around 1.4 GB per month. But the study suggests "dongle" traffic growth is slowing.

On a per-user basis, fixed broadband consumption rose 18 percent in the latest survey; phone broadband consumption shot up 24 percent per user; while mobile broadband data card usage rose by just two percent.

Data: ABS. Graph: Richard Chirgwin, The Register

Although there are nearly three people using a mobile handset for broadband access for every one fixed account, fixed users still account for more than 94 percent of the total
bandwidth consumed.