Are teenagers forcing carrier data networks to a tipping point?

As any parent, I am concerned about my kids’ excessive use of technology.

However, beyond the classic concerns about health, and the lack of face-to-face social interactions, I have recently added concerns around my kids’ data usage. Probably just like yours, our mobile phone bill started to skyrocket in recent months.

I am curiously watching the makeup of our carrier bill. While the voice and text messaging usage remains flat, the data usage and associated costs are starting to grow exponentially.

The two greatest offenders devouring our data? My two daughters – aged 11 and 15 years old.

I can’t help wondering, if there’s something big brewing. Are we approaching the tipping point of mobile usage, and could it break the carrier networks?

The significant changes began to emerge around the holidays, when I started to receive data usage alerts from my carrier. So like any good parent, I encouraged my girls to use Wi-Fi networks, and like any sucker, I increased the data package for my girls to 10GB. Given that I personally use around 4GB consistently, I figured 10GB would be more than sufficient for my girls who share a data plan.

       In January they blew through the data package.

       By February, I had to up the ante to 20GB – which we just exceeded yesterday!

I decided to take a deeper dive to figure out which applications were the perpetrators and found the following:

• For my 15 year old: Snapchat 24GB total (including WI-FI) and Instagram 3GB;
• For my 11 year old: Musik.ly 5.4GB and Snapchat 3.8 GB; and
• For me: My 4GB of data were actually spread across a dozen apps, with no app using more than 1GB.
• I also looked at six other teenagers’ phones and found that Snapchat data usage was between 20GB and 50GB per month!

In my kids’ defense, we were traveling quite a bit, so Wi-Fi was not always available as an alternative. But Snapchat is their main means of communication, so it’s inherently intended to be used when you are out and about.

In addition to learning how much teenagers love Snapchat, there were three takeaways from my personal case study:

1. Mobile is Morphing: Our kids use their phones very differently. Texts and email messages are “out”, and the only voice calls they receive are from their parents.
2. Data can be used to predict the next hit: Data usage is a beautiful indicator to predict future app hits. Based on these indicators, Snapchat, Musik.ly and Dubsmash are tomorrow’s Facebook competitors.
3. Next Gen Apps are Data Hungry: The apps of tomorrow combine the social sharing functionality of Facebook, with the gamification of Clash of Clans and the video aspects of YouTube. This combination seems to be pointing at exponential data usage growth.

As these kids grow up, and the next generation of teenagers join them in the mobile revolution, it will be interesting to see how today’s carrier networks will adapt to handle the increase in data that ranges from nearly 5-20 times today’s data usage rates from a technical perspective. It will also become challenging for carriers to explain $500 cell phone bills to consumers.

For us parents, there are interesting times ahead. Clearly it will become paramount to restrict the cellular data usage of these apps and only use them on Wi-Fi, but will we need to prepare for a world of significantly higher data usage at home and on the road.