Demand for mobile broadband

Cisco continues to foresee an enormous surge in wireless demand.

Let’s take a look at their North American regional breakout. Cisco estimates that in 2010, North Americans transmitted 49 Petabytes (PB) per month over mobile networks. That’s about 4,900 times the amount of information in the printed collection of the Library of Congress. By 2015, Cisco expects this number will grow to 986 Petabytes – nearly one Exabyte, equivalent to almost 100,000 Libraries of Congress. In relative terms, Cisco’s projects 20X growth in the next five years. This is lower than the 47X growth forecast in the previous Cisco report, but only because this year’s forecast starts from a higher “base” compared to the previous year. Overall, Cisco predicts that data growth begins to slow down in out years, but that the growth still continues at an impressive rate. The forecast consumption is 58X larger in 2015 compared to the 2009 estimate reported in last year’s report. Any way you look at it, that’s enormous growth. Importantly, the report accounts for some offsetting effects, most notably the use of WiFi and femtocell networks to “offload” capacity from the mobile network to a fixed broadband connection. Cisco estimates that about 21% of traffic from smartphones and tablets was offloaded to WiFi or femtocells in 2010 and that this proportion will increase to 30% by 2015. This finding demonstrates the vital importance of unlicensed spectrum in helping address our nation’s wireless capacity needs. Still, overall traffic growth is likely to outpace offloading, according to Cisco’s forecast.