Vodacom smartphone data use: 2011 to 2014
Vodacom recently released its interim results for the six months ending on 30 September 2014, which show that the average amount of data used per smartphone increased 55.4% over the last year to 336MB per month.
Vodacom further said that the number of active smartphones and tablets on its network increased 21.1% to 8 million.
According to Vodacom’s results the average monthly data usage on tablets increased 28.9% to 879MB.
By comparison, in September 2011 Vodacom had 4.1 million smartphones on its network which used an average of 84MB a month.
The following graphs show the number of smartphones on Vodacom’s network and the average amount of data – in MB – used by these smartphones from September 2011 to September 2014.
Number of smartphones on Vodacom’s network
Number of smartphones
Average data use per smartphone
Average monthly data use per smartphone
Coping with massive data demand
The growth in the popularity of smartphones and the increase in the average amount of data used per device means that Vodacom has to continually increase its network’s capacity.
In September 2011 Vodacom’s smartphone users consumed 344 million megabytes (344 terabytes) of data per month. This number grew to 2,673 million megabytes (2,673 terabytes) in September 2014.
To accommodate this growth Vodacom doubled the number of its LTE sites to nearly 2,000 over the last year. Vodacom also added 745 3G sites to improve its 3G coverage to 94.1% of the population.
“We have now also concluded our six-year project to upgrade our radio access network with 4G-ready equipment and have extended our self-provided high-speed transmission to 76.3% of our sites,” Vodacom said.
Overall Vodacom smartphone data use per month
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