Mobile Data Use Expected To Grow 21x By 2015

Mobile phone networks, get your houses in order. Here is how much mobile data consumption is expected to grow in the next four years…

That is according to Cisco (NSDQ: CSCO) Systems’ Visual Networking Index data, republished in UK communications regulator Ofcom’s International Communications Market Report 2011.

UK users are the most data-hungry. In 2010, average monthly data consumption per customer jumped by 108 percent.

But that still only reached 268Mb per month. By 2015, Cisco forecasts that will grow 21-fold to hit 4Gb per month – almost double the U.S. data rate.

Most of the consumption comes form dongles connected to laptops, however.

By the time Cisco’s forecast becomes a reality, many networks, which have already been investing in bolstering their 3G networks, are expected to have 4G networks.