Cisco Makes Its Annual Predictions on Mobile Data Traffic

Cisco Systems released its annual multiyear forecast for global mobile data traffic. This forecast, covering the years 2014-2019, has what has become the usual projection of tenfold growth in mobile traffic over the period -- in this case, to 24.3 exabytes a month. (One exabyte is a billion gigabytes.)

Digging into the numbers, a few significant factors are seen as the causes for that sustained growth. For one, by 2019, 69 percent of the world, or 5.2 billion people, are expected to be mobile users. Among that crowd, there will be 4.6 billion smartphones, compared with 3.1 billion feature phones. Clearly, many people will own more than one phone. The study also covered connected devices like tablets and Wi-Fi-enabled laptops, which Cisco said were likely to regain share from tablets. Another important development is the amount and type of traffic that will be offloaded from conventional cellular systems to Wi-Fi and small cell networks. Cisco said 54 percent of mobile data traffic will be on these systems, which keep carriers from congestion, but also keep them from realizing some profits, since they can’t charge for Wi-Fi connections the same way.