CTIA® released its annual survey results, which found Americans used 9.6 trillion megabytes (MB) of data in 2015, three times the 3.2 trillion MB in 2013. This is the equivalent of consumers streaming 59,219 videos every minute or roughly 18 million MB.  The survey found:

Smartphones are the number-one wireless device in the U.S. and still growing:

• There were more than 228 million smartphones, which was up almost 10 percent from 2014. 70 percent of the population now owns a smartphone.
• There were more than 41 million tablets on wireless networks, up 16 percent from 2014.

Americans prefer mobile devices to communicate

• Americans talked more than 2.8 trillion minutes on their mobile phones, up more than 17 percent from 2014.
• Americans exchanged more than 2.1 trillion texts, videos and photo messages, or more than four million every minute.

To handle the increase in devices and usage, America’s wireless carriers invested almost $32 billion in 2015, including adding almost 10,000 new cell sites. Since 2010, carriers invested more than $177 billion to improve their coverage and capacity to better serve all Americans.

“Americans today have mobile-first lives. In 2014, we had a record amount of data on our 4G networks. Remarkably, the amount of traffic on mobile networks more than doubled last year and shows no signs of slowing down,” said Meredith Attwell Baker, president and CEO, CTIA.