The Explosion of Mobile Video

Cisco just released its annual five-year forecast for mobile data traffic, which projects that by 2016 mobile data will amount to 130 exabytes annually, 18 times current levels.

That data figure is roughly the amount of data on 33 billion DVDs, or 813 quadrillion text messages. The United Nations figures that by 2016 there will be 7.3 billion people on Earth. Cisco says there will be 10 billion mobile devices by then, because they count sensors and people owning a tablet as well as a smartphone. It is still useful to think of the data consumption in five years being equal to every person on the planet downloading the contents of 4.5 DVDs. “Seventy-one percent of mobile traffic will be video by 2016,” says Suraj Shetty, vice president for product marketing at Cisco, who conducted the study. “Just Netflix on demand has had a huge impact on the network since 2009.” Throw in Google’s YouTube and a couple of other players, plus whatever new players, and you’ve got about three-quarters of Internet traffic in the form of video.