Cisco sees mobile data usage increasing 8-fold by 2016

Cisco Systems, the company that wants to build “the human network” released their annual Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast today, and they foresee mobile users consuming data in 2016 at a rate 8x higher than they project for this year.

How much data is that? Cisco expects mobile data usage in 2012 to average 1.3 exabytes a month (an exabyte is a thousand petabytes, or if you prefer, a million terabytes of data). In four short years that number will balloon to an astonishing 10.8 exabytes of mobile data per month. Around that time Cisco also expects the number of mobile devices to eclipse 10 billion, at which point there will be more than one mobile device for every man, woman, and child expected to be alive in 2016 (which is expected to be around 7.3 billion).

What will we be doing with all that data? Apparently watching kitten videos on YouTube, as video is expected to make up 70.5% of all mobile bandwidth. In addition to the aforementioned cute animal videos, video chat, streaming television (which itself may come from YouTube), movie rentals, and other sources of moving pictures will be the norm on mobile devices, rather than the exception.

As you can imagine, all of this extra data will require more infrastructure. Cisco, a maker of some of that telecommunications hardware, probably sees a rosy future ahead. For consumers, Cisco’s vision is also a positive one – that of an increasingly connected world that will provide more bandwidth in more places.

If you want a look at that future, and some of the other findings, you can check out the video Cisco released along with their study. For those of you who want the nitty-gritty details, all of this and a whole lot more can be found in their white paper in the source link.



source: Cisco via Engadget, AllThingsD