- Mobile data traffic growth leveled off in the first quarter, after increasing modestly during 2025, Ericsson says
- FWA deployments will be a major determinant of future data growth
- AI will drive more uplink traffic, including more video uploads.
Anyone wondering why wireless broadband providers are collectively spending $3.5 billion for additional mid-band spectrum should take a look at the latest Ericsson Mobility Report. Mobile network data traffic grew 22% year-on-year and 5% quarter-on-quarter in Q1 2026, reaching 210 exabytes, according to Ericsson.
Traffic on mobile networks has been rising for decades, but the rate of growth has actually been slowing, until recently. Seven years ago year-on-year mobile network data traffic growth was above 80%, but by the first quarter of 2025 it had fallen to below 20%. Then a year ago it started to increase slightly, quarter by quarter, flattening at 22% in the first quarter of 2026. Is this a plateau — or a quick breather on an upward climb?
“The dark horse is always what's going on with fixed wireless access,” said Ericsson’s Peter Linder, head of thought leadership Americas. The typical FWA connection uses 500 GB of data per month, versus 25 GB per month for a typical smartphone, he said. “A one or 2% increase in fixed wireless subscriptions is like adding 10 to 20% subscriptions on the mobile, so the moment you add in fixed wireless, it's increasing,” he said.
Satellite, fixed wireless growth ahead
Ericsson is projecting solid growth in FWA going forward, but Linder said it may not be as pronounced as recent years. “Over the last four years, we've seen consistently, since the beginning of 2022, fixed wireless access taking all net adds in the US,” he said. Going forward, he thinks cable’s declines are likely to moderate, and the growth of satellite connections will be significant.
Satellite broadband subscriptions are projected by Ericsson to increase 230% between 2025 and 2031, up from 10 million to 33 million. This year alone, Ericsson projects the number of subscriptions will increase from 10 million last year to 15 million by year-end.
For fixed wireless, the growth rate will be slower off a larger base. Ericsson foresees those connections rising from 185 million last year to 291 million by 2031, and expects 5G to account for more than half of all global FWA connections by 2029, Linder said. “It will probably require mid-band 5G for meaningful fixed broadband services wherever people want to deploy,” he said.
Linder does not expect wireless carriers to build new sites exclusively for FWA, but he thinks operators will dimension sites for both mobile broadband and FWA, to sell consumers converged service.
AI means more video traffic
When Ericsson projects mobile data traffic, the company does not segment AI traffic. Instead, it considers application categories, and the biggest category is always video. Linder expects AI to increase the video uplink portion of mobile data traffic.
Most of us now send images to the cloud through AI applications, but in the future our phones could do this automatically and continuously, Linder said. Our phones or wearable devices could constantly scan our environments and capture video images. If our devices have enough storage and processing power to analyze those videos locally (or figure out they’re worthless and discard them), network impacts will be minimal. If, on the other hand, our phones are constantly pinging the network with large video images, the increase in traffic will be huge.
Ericsson’s analysis found that growth in uplink traffic is already exceeding growth in downlink traffic. More than three quarters of operators experienced a higher uplink growth rate than downlink growth rate in 2025, Ericsson reported.
In the enterprise, Linder said, video uplink is set to grow. Sensors already capture video and send it to the cloud for analysis. “Sensors that are feeding AI agents with real time information, those you definitely want to make sure that you have on a secure and reliable connection, because if you have 10 minutes downtime in the middle of something, that could be disastrous,” Linder said. He noted that this type of traffic is typically much heavier on the uplink than the downlink, because the agents may only return information when they spot an anomaly.
Making way for AI
While Ericsson isn’t segmenting AI traffic for its projections, it does recommend that operators segment and prioritize this traffic on their networks. It takes AI to manage AI, because networks will need to automatically recognize and prioritize important traffic. Linder compared mission-critical AI workloads to first-responder vehicles with flashing lights, and said other traffic may need to temporarily slow down and make way.
High-value AI traffic may be competing for bandwidth with social media posts and video messages, because a large portion of it is uplink traffic. This is the key change operators need to prepare for, according to Ericsson.
“Uplink is becoming the new bottleneck in mobile networks, driven by AI and user-generated content,” according to the report. “As traffic patterns shift, networks designed for downlink dominance must evolve to support a more uplink-intensive future.”