Cisco has published the results of its annual Visual Networking Index Forecast, which predicts and analyses worldwide Internet Protocol networking growth and trends for a five-year period. It expects annual global IP traffic to reach 1.3 zettabytes (1.3 trillion gigabytes) by 2016, nearly four times the total in 2011. The number of network-connected devices is expected to reach 18.9 billion; almost 2.5 connections for each person on earth and approaching double the 2011 total of 10.3 billion devices.
Global mobile internet data traffic is forecast to increase 18 times from 2011 to 2016, with the number of mobile consumers forecast to grow from 3.7 billion in 2011 to 4.5 billion by 2016.
Mobile video is projected to be the fastest-growing consumer mobile service (from 271 million users in 2011 to 1.6 billion users in 2016) while SMS will have the highest penetration of consumer mobile services (from 74% of users in 2011 to 90% in 2016). Location-based services are forecast to be the fastest-growing business mobile service, from 27 million users in 2011 to 158 million users by 2016.
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