Primarily fueled by online video, Europeans will continue to consume more data over their mobile handsets in the years ahead, a report by Cicso Systems predicts.
The network equipment supplier said the average handset owner in Europe will pull in 18 MB of data per month by 2012, with US handset owners demanding less than half that amount, PC World reports. Currently, users in Europe consume 800 KB per month on average, compared to 400 KB in the US. Then, as now, almost a third of the demand will come from a small fraction of users -- 1 percent, Cisco expects.
The data and predictions include people with even the most primitive data connections along with owners of high-powered smartphones and other devices with 3G or better. However, it's the latter group that will account for the biggest boost in mobile data use. Cisco says that laptops with cellular data cards will boom in the next five years, growing from 630 MB uf use per month to 5 GB in Europe, and from 528 MB a month to 4.3 GB in the US.
Video will account for 64 percent of mobile data usage in 2013, Cisco says. Most of that will come from video Web sites like YouTube and Hulu, while fancy technology like multi-way video chat will remain a rarity.
It's not clear from PC World's report why data use will grow larger in Europe than in the U.S. Perhaps there are clues in the European Union's decision to cap data roaming charges and the general explosion of mobile data use as prices go down.
