U.S. MOBILE INTERNET TRAFFIC NEARLY DOUBLED THIS YEAR

Story first appeared on NYTimes.com.

Two big shifts happened in the American cellphone industry over the past year: Cellular networks got faster, and smartphone screens got bigger. As a result, people’s consumption of mobile data nearly doubled.

In the United States, consumers used an average of 1.2 gigabytes a month over cellular networks this year, up from 690 megabytes a month in 2012, according to Chetan Sharma, a consultant for wireless carriers, who published a new report on industry trends on Monday. Worldwide, the average consumption was 240 megabytes a month this year, up from 140 megabytes last year, he said.

But what’s in a megabyte or gigabyte anyway? A megabyte is about the amount of data required to download a photo taken with a decent digital camera, or one minute of a song, or a decent stack of e-mail.

So using that analogy — 1.2 gigabytes of mobile data a month looks something like 1,200 photos that a person downloaded to the Internet from a mobile device each month, compared with 690 photos he downloaded a month last year.

That is a significant jump. Mr. Sharma said the uptick in data use could be attributed, at least partly, to the widespread coverage of fourth-generation network technology, called LTE, which carriers say is 10 times faster than its predecessor, 3G. He said the rise was also connected to the popularity of phones with bigger screens, like the newer iPhones or Samsung’s Galaxy smartphones, which download bigger images.

About 1.4 billion smartphones will be in use by the end of this year, according to ABI Research. Cisco, the networking company, predicts that Internet traffic from mobile devices will exceed that of wired devices, like desktop computers, by 2016.