AT&T VP: data usage has grown 20,000 percent in the last five years

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the death of unlimited data, and AT&T’s enforcement of throttling on users who still have unlimited plans, so a senior executive at AT&T recently posted to the company’s blog detailing the extreme influx of data traffic the company has seen in recent years. According to John Donovan, a senior executive VP for AT&T, date usage on the network has increased a whopping 20,000 percent over the last five years, with usage at least doubling every year. Of course, AT&T just sold a record number of smartphones in Q4 2011, so the company’s not expecting this trend to change any time soon. Donovan also detailed the $20 billion spent on network improvements in 2011 and said the company expects to spend the same in 2012. There’s some question as to exactly how accurate these numbers are, but AT&T’s comments about its “wireless data tsunami” could be seen as an effort to deflect criticism from the caps it has been imposing on unlimited data users.