Daily roaming data traffic in Hungary nearly doubles over three years
Year after year, we are using mobile internet more and more when abroad, while the volume of roaming voice calls declined last year, the latest Mobile Market Report from the National Media and Infocommunications Authority (NMHH) shows. The main reason for the increase in data traffic is not that Hungarians are traveling more; rather, today, we use nearly twice as much mobile data during a single day abroad compared to three years ago.
The media authority publishes its Mobile Market Report every six months, examining not only the domestic use of mobile subscriptions but also their international use, including the number of roaming mobile phones and the traffic they generate. The latest analysis focused on data from the period between 2022 and 2025 as mobile usage abroad in years before that period was still significantly affected by travel restrictions related to the COVID19 pandemic.
Over the four years under review, the volume of mobile data used abroad grew steadily and significantly, with roaming mobile internet traffic up by 51 per cent in 2023, 32 per cent in 2024, and a further 16 per cent in 2025 compared to the previous year. The growth rate has thus slowed, but data traffic has continued to reach new heights year after year.
Traditional voice calls, however, show a completely different picture with roaming call traffic up by a mere 4 per cent in 2023, remaining essentially unchanged in 2024, and then going into decline by 3 per cent in 2025. In international mobile usage, there is a noticeably widening gap between the increasing use of mobile internet and stagnant, then declining voice traffic.
The study highlights that roaming usage has remained highly seasonal, with both data and voice traffic being the highest in the third quarter from July through September, and at its lowest in the first three months of the year. The summer surge is particularly striking in the case of mobile internet: on average, over the four years analysed, data traffic in the third quarter exceeded first-quarter levels by 64 per cent. For voice calls, this difference was only 14 per cent.
Data also shows that the growth in mobile internet traffic is not primarily driven by an increase in the number of trips abroad. Tourism data from the Hungarian Central Statistical Office shows a significant increase of 26 per cent in the amount of time Hungarians spent abroad in 2022, in the wake of the COVID19 pandemic; this growth, however, subsequently stalled and a slight decline was observed by 2025. Meanwhile, mobile data usage per day spent abroad has been steadily increasing: while in 2022, 0.6 GB of data was used per day spent abroad on average, by 2025 that figure has risen to 1.1 GB, meaning that roaming data usage per day increased by nearly 90 per cent over the course of three years. This trend is consistent with the fact that users are generally generating increasing volumes of data traffic on their mobile devices, regardless of whether they are in Hungary or abroad.
In contrast, the opposite trend can be observed for voice calls: in 2022, there were an average of 15 minutes of outbound roaming voice calls per day spent abroad, but by 2025, that figure had dropped to just 12 minutes. Interestingly, both data and voice traffic per day decline during the third, summer, quarter, precisely when most people travel abroad. One possible explanation is that leisure travel accounts for a larger share during the summer and people tend to use their mobile phones less frequently during such trips than, for example, when working abroad.