Our mobile phone bills are higher than ever
Better connections come with bigger prices—and both of these have been on a steady incline these past few years, as a recent study reveals.
The Juniper Research report (via BusinessWire) disclosed some startling numbers yesterday, along with the prediction that carrier billing spending is set to reach USD $73.8 billion annual spending worldwide by 2024. Between January and December of 2021, for comparison, smartphone users spent $54.4 billion on their phone bills.
Video streaming and mobile gaming are the biggest contributors to pricey phone bills
Smartphone owners around the world are currently enjoying faster internet connections than ever before, with new 5G speeds already available widely around the United States, Europe, and Asia, and continuously growing.
As part of this global phenomenon, average bandwidth usage rates are going up every year. Nearly everyone these days owns an account in one of the major video streaming platforms such as Netflix or Hulu, and with 5G making it possible to stream your favorite series in extremely high quality, it's easy to use up unearthly numbers of gigabytes every month.
Apart from video streaming, the other major contributing factor has been 5G mobile gaming. As we recently reported, mobile gaming currently owns over 50% of the gaming market, earning more than the PC and console gaming industry combined. Over the past year, it's been steadily on the rise, a trend that isn't expected to subside anytime soon.
Digital ticketing is also considered a prime area for potential global growth in the coming years. Mobile ticketing is a relatively recent phenomenon which capitalizes on most consumers' dependency and close proximity to their mobile phones, allowing the purchase and validation of tickets for admission to events exclusively from their phones, eliminating the need for a paper trail.
The Juniper Research report also showed that the Indian Subcontinent would be targeted by mobile carriers as a key region of expansion, where smartphones ownership is expected to hit a record 50% by 2024.
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