The increasing amount of content being created and stored by consumers on mobile devices is pushing smartphones to the limit when it comes to storage, according to new research published on the opening day of Mobile World Congress 2016.

The amount of content stored by smartphone users has grown by 55% over the past 10 months, equating to a month-on-month growth rate of 6%, according to a study carried out by mobile software and cloud solutions provider Synchronoss Technologies.

The firm said it studied the habits of 30 million consumers worldwide. It augmented its results with data from 451 Research - which notes that the average U.S. smartphone user takes up 10.8 GB of storage on their device and predicts that figure will grow by 8% per month going forward – in order to encourage operators to take action.

Based on that 6% global growth rate, a typical smartphone with 16 GB of capacity, including 12 GB for content storage will be full in two months from today, Synchronoss warns.

"This exponential rise in mobile content presents huge challenges for carriers in helping consumers manage their valuable personal content." said Ted Woodbery, VP of marketing and product strategy at Synchronoss.

"The mobile industry is on the cusp of several new innovations which will drive heavier content creation at a faster rate," Woodbery said. "This will quickly outstrip the limited storage capacity remaining on most popular smartphones today."

These innovations include 4K high-definition video, improvements in smartphone cameras, and faster processing power on devices.

Furthermore, the availability of increased storage – on devices or in the cloud – will itself drive greater content generation, Synchronoss said.

Thus, it believes its 6% monthly growth figure is a conservative prediction.

"No one can accurately predict the likely impact, but monthly double digit growth in content creation and storage per subscriber look all but guaranteed," Woodbery said.

The solution? There are a number, but naturally the one proposed by Synchronoss is for mobile operators to deploy white label cloud technology to give customers additional storage and to back up their data.

Whether this is the ideal solution for consumers, who might prefer a service that does not tie them to their network operator, remains to be seen.

Credit: TotalTele