Nokia found that mobile data consumption in India has been growing at a rate of 18% CAGR over the last five years, with monthly average usage per user surpassing 31 GB in 2025.
Increasing demand for data-intensive services like 4K video streaming, cloud gaming, and AI-based apps is fuelling the expansion. 5G adoption is also on the rise. Over 27 exabytes of data was transmitted monthly by mobile devices in the nation in 2025.
5G is quickly becoming a major factor in growth, accounting for approximately 47% of all traffic and experiencing a 70% year-on-year increase in usage to 12.9 exabytes per month. While smaller towns and rural areas are seeing accelerated acceptance, metro markets still lead the way when it comes to 5G adoption, accounting for 58% of total data traffic.
With 892 million 4G devices active in 2025 and over 383 million 5G-capable devices, the growing ecosystem of connected devices is providing additional support for this shift. During the year, 5G was enabled by more than 90% of devices that were shipped.
The paper goes on to say that AI will be a major factor in future network demand, thus telecom companies will have to upgrade their infrastructure to handle more data, have less latency, and use more powerful computers.
Forecasts indicate that India’s digital transformation will continue to gain steam, with the 5G user base expected to surpass 1 billion by 2031.
