Wi-Fi to Overtake Wired Network Traffic by 2015

Wi-Fi devices will for the first time use more bandwidth than wired devices in 2015, according to Cisco’s new Visual Networking Index (VNI) Global IP Traffic Forecast.

Cisco predicts Wi-Fi devices will consume 37.2 Exabytes of data worldwide per month in 2015, which is slightly more than the 37.0 Exabytes of wired IP traffic the company is forecasting. And Wi-Fi will take up 46.2 percent of all IP traffic in 2015, up from 36 percent of all IP traffic in 2010. The share of wired IP traffic, on the other hand, will sink from 63 percent in 2010 to 46.1 percent in 2015. Mobile networks will place third, with 6.3 Exabytes per month, but cell phone network operators will have to adapt faster than anyone else to growing data consumption: Mobile IP traffic will grow 26 times over the period, compared to three-fold growth for wired and five-fold growth for Wi-Fi traffic. Mobile will make up 8 percent of global IP traffic in 2015. Last year, mobile users only consumed 237 Petabytes per month, which accounted for 1 percent of the global IP traffic.