Cisco: Mobile Traffic Set For 26-Fold Surge

From today until 2015, data trafficking on mobile devices will undergo a remarkable surge according to a study from Cisco.

Cisco, the San Jose-based networking products company, says during the next five years mobile data traffic will increase 26-fold reaching 6.3 exabytes per month or an annual run rate of 75 exabytes. The surge in traffic represents a compound annual growth rate of 92 percent, Cisco said.

By the end of that period, Cisco projects more than 5.6 billion personal devices will be connected to mobile networks and 1.5 billion machine-to-machine nodes will active. Video will represent 66 percent of all data traffic on mobile devices, a 35-fold increase from 2010.

By 2015, there will be a mobile-connected device for nearly every member of the world's population, which will be approximately 7.2 billion. Whereas mobile data today generates 65 megabytes of traffic per month, Cisco estimates in five years it will be 1,118 megabytes of traffic per month.

Cisco says mobile data traffic increased 159 percent from calendar year 2009 to 2010 to 237 petabytes per month, or the equivalent of 60 million DVDs. Meanwhile, mobile data grew 4.2 times as fast as global fixed broadband data traffic in 2010.

Consumers and business users continue to demonstrate a healthy demand for mobile data services. The fact that global mobile data traffic increased 2.6-fold from 2009 to 2010, nearly tripling for the third year in a row, confirms the strength of the mobile Internet. The seemingly endless bevy of new mobile devices, combined with greater mobile broadband access, more content, and applications of all types -- especially video -- are the key catalysts driving this remarkable growth, said Suraj Shetty, vice president, worldwide service provider marketing, Cisco, in a statement.

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