If you think your cool new 5GB-per-month mobile data plan will be enough to last for a couple of years, you might be in for an unpleasant surprise.

According to Ericsson's latest Mobility Report, released Wednesday, a mobile data consumption explosion is happening, with mobile traffic growing 60% between the first quarter of 2015 and 2016.

And due to the rising number of smartphone subscriptions (especially for LTE-capable smartphones), and the increasing data consumption per subscriber, the trend will continue, with a predicted tenfold increase — to 22GB per subscriber in North America — in mobile traffic by the end of 2021.

Western Europeans will use a little less traffic by then, 18GB per month per subscriber, while folks in the Asia Pacific region will use up 7GB per month. However, due to a rapid growth of subscribers, the Asia Pacific region will have the largest share of mobile data traffic in 2021.

The trend is driven by the continuing rise of the smartphone. Ericsson claims smartphone subscriptions will overtake non-smartphone ones in the third quarter of 2016. Long-term, dumbphones are essentially dead; by 2021, 95% of all phones in North America will be smartphones.

Image: ERicsson

So how do we (or, better put, the mobile network operators) cope with these increased traffic demands? Well, one alleviating factor will be the transition to fast 5G networks, which should start to be commercially deployed in 2020, reaching 150 million global subscribers by the end of 2021.

Another interesting data point from the report is the rise of Internet of Things devices — your connected cars, fridges, scales and other similar gizmos — the number of which will quadruple to 16 billion globally by 2021. That will make this category by far the largest among the connected devices; in fact, IoT gadgets should overtake mobile phones (the current largest category) by 2018.

Of course, all of these are just predictions, which can be way off in the fast-changing world of smartphones and IoT. Ericsson predicted in 2013 that the number of global mobile subscriptions would reach 9.1 billion by the end of 2018; now, the company says it would take until 2021 for that number to reach 9 billion. Similarly, in last year's Mobility Report, Ericsson predicted the IoT category of devices would number 11 billion by 2020; now, that number is significantly higher, at around 15 billion.

Check out the full Ericsson Mobility Report here.

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