Germans continued to use the internet intensively in 2022, and the data volume used for fixed-network internet access increased significantly again. This confirms and strengthens a trend that was already evident two years earlier – at that time during the coronavirus pandemic with its lockdowns. According to information from the Federal Network Agency (BNetzA), data consumption for broadband connections throughout Germany was 121 billion gigabytes last year.
That was almost a quarter more than in 2021, the BNetzA informed the German Press Agency on request. That was an average of 275 gigabytes per user per month. For comparison: in 2020 the used fixed network data volume was still 76 billion gigabytes (per user 175 gigabytes per month) and in 2019 it was 60 billion gigabytes (per user 142 gigabytes per month). Since 2014, the volume of data consumed has increased tenfold.
More and more data consumption – even after the pandemic
The increased use of the internet continues even after the end of the pandemic measures with the increased amount of time spent at home: private preferences such as surfing, streaming, gaming and cloud use on more and more networked devices as well as frequent work at home with video conferences are apparently also without lockdowns increasingly common. But the content itself also requires more and more volume: such as films in higher resolution, online games or speech recognition via the cloud.
Data traffic also continued to rise sharply in mobile communications: Here, too, the data volume used increased by almost a quarter to 6.7 billion gigabytes last year. Usage was 3.97 billion gigabytes in 2020 and 2.76 billion gigabytes in 2019. The increase is also likely to be due to the fact that more and more users are using mobile data in their own homes because more and more mobile phone contracts include large data packages.
(tiw)
To home page
