US connectivity cloud provider Cloudflare has published its annual review of Internet trends and it shows a small decline in the proportion of total internet traffic accounted for by mobile devices.
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.
