Global mobile traffic is more than doubling every year, and reach 2 exabytes a month in 2013, says Cisco
By that time just under 64% of all mobile traffic will be video, according to the latest Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) forecast.
The survey says mobile data and video traffic are growing at a faster rate than the internet at a comparable period. Mobile data will grow from 1 petabyte (1,000 terabytes) per month to 1 exabyte (1,000 petabytes) per month in half the time it took fixed data traffic to do so.
In the seven years from 2005 to 2012, mobile data traffic will have increased a thousand-fold. It took 14 years for the internet to grow from 1 petabyte per month to 1 exabyte per month.
Cisco said that with a compound average growth rate (CAGR) of 150% between 2008 and 2013, mobile video has the highest growth rate of any application category ever measured by the Cisco VNI.
By 2013, Asia-Pacific will account for one-third of all mobile data traffic, and together with western Europe and APAC will account for over 60% of the global total.