Mobile share of total internet traffic seems to be declining

The 2024 Cloudflare Radar Year in Review has loads of datapoints for anyone wanting to geek out on this stuff. Global internet traffic grew by 17% this year according to Cloudflare, a slower rate than last year’s 25%. The company doesn’t always extract the same datapoints in each annual summary, and doesn’t offer an annual comparison tool, but last year’s review pegged mobile’s share of total traffic at 41.9%. This year that proportion is down to 41.3%.

This figure doesn’t distinguish between cellular and wifi, and total traffic to mobile devices is still rising, but this year-on-year decline is still surprising given the increasing ubiquity of smartphones. The proportion varies significantly between countries, with the mobile proportion in Sudan, Cuba, and Syria above 77%. Bizarrely, the proportion in Nokia’s home of Finland is just 23%, Ireland is even lower at 15% and Iran is bottom with just 6% of its internet traffic coming from mobile devices.

While one should be careful not to read too much into this one comparison, it adds to the feeling that the incessant growth in mobile data traffic relied upon by mobile kit vendors as a key demand driver may be in terminal decline. Ericsson is having to continually revise downwards its mobile traffic forecasts and the s-curve in global traffic growth trends predicted by some is looking increasingly plausible.

Elsewhere in the Cloudflare report, we learn that the picture of the main internet services used is stable, with Google the most popular overall (thanks to its dominance of both search and browser share, see below), WhatsApp the most popular messaging platform, and Facebook the biggest social media site. Starlink traffic growth is also stable at around 3x and Spain is identified as the best country for a basket of internet quality metrics, including average download speed.