New figures from IT business Cisco forecast a 13-fold increase in mobile internet data between now and 2017.
It’s expecting worldwide mobile data traffic to reach 11.2 exabytes per month - an annual total of 134EB - by 2017. That’s 134 times more than all the fixed and mobile internet traffic generated in 2000. One exabyte is a quintillion bytes (or a billion Gigabytes).
This growth is expected to be driven by the increasing number of mobile phone users, the increasing number of mobile devices and M2M connections, faster data speeds and an increasing demand for mobile video.
Overall, between 2012 and 2017, global mobile data traffic is expected to grow by an average of 66% every year: three times faster than fixed data traffic.
The survey also notes an increasing move towards offloading mobile data onto WiFi networks. Last year, around 33% of all mobile data traffic was offloaded (428 petabytes per month) - but by 2017, this figures is expected to reach 46% (9.6 exabytes per month).
Doug Webster, Vice President of Service Provider Networking Marketing at Cisco, said “By 2017, global mobile data traffic will continue its truly remarkable growth, increasing 13-fold over the next five years, to reach an amount more than 46 times the total amount of mobile IP traffic just a few years ago in 2010. With such dramatic adoption, we are rapidly approaching the time when nearly every network experience will be a mobile one and, more often than not, a visual one as well. This trend is a result of the seemingly insatiable demand by consumers and businesses alike to achieve the benefits gained when connecting people, data, and things in an Internet of Everything.”
[Cisco Visual Networking Index Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast for 2012 to 2017]