Worldwide mobile data traffic
will increase 18-fold over the next five years, reaching 10.8 exabytes per month by 2016, according to Cisco’s newly published Visual Networking
Index (VNI) Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast. This represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 78 percent over the period of 2011 to 2016.
The leading causes of this torrid growth are the rapid penetration of mobile connectivity across all societies worldwide and growing prevalence of video traffic. Cisco predicts there will be more than 10 billion mobile Internet-connected devices in 2016, including two billion machine-to-machine (M2M) modules — exceeding the world‟s projected population at that time of 7.3 billion.
“By 2016, 60 percent of mobile users — 3 billion people worldwide — will belong to the „Gigabyte Club,‟ each generating more than one gigabyte of mobile data traffic per month. By contrast, in 2011, only one-half percent of mobile users qualified. This impressive growth in mobile traffic will be driven by more powerful devices, notably smartphones and tablets, using faster networks, such as 4G and Wi-Fi, to access more applications, 4
particularly data-intensive video,�? stated Suraj Shetty, vice president of product and solutions marketing, Cisco.
Some highlights of the report:
Global mobile data traffic grew 2.3-fold in 2011, more than doubling for the fourth year in a row.
Mobile video traffic was 52 percent of traffic by the end of 2011 — the first time video has represented the majority of mobile (cellular) traffic.
4G users generated 28 times more traffic on average than a non-4G connection. Although 4G connections represent only 0.2 percent of mobile connections today, they already account for 6 percent of mobile data traffic.
The average amount of traffic per smartphone in 2011 was 150 MB per month, up from 55 MB per month in 2010.
In 2016, 4G will be 6 percent of connections, but 36 percent of total traffic. In 2016, a 4G connection will generate 9 times more traffic on average than a non-4G connectioN.
In 2011, 11 percent, or 72 petabytes, per month of total mobile data traffic was offloaded. By 2016, 22 percent, or 3.1 exabytes, per month of total mobile data traffic will be offloaded.
Should all aspects of mobility be taken into consideration, such as cellular traffic, traffic offloaded from cellular networks and fixed/Wi-Fi traffic generated from portable devices, the total amount of mobility traffic would be more than four times the Cisco Mobile VNI forecast‟s
2016 cellular traffic level.
Smartphones, laptops and other portable devices will drive about 90 percent of global mobile data traffic by 2016.
M2M traffic will represent 5 percent of 2016 global mobile data traffic while residential broadband mobile gateways will account for the remaining 5 percent of global mobile data traffic.
The average smartphone connection speed will rise from 1.344 Mbps in 2011 to 5.244 Mbps in 2016.
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