A new report from Juniper Research estimates the amount of mobile data traffic generated by smartphones and tablets will exceed 14,000 petabytes by 2015, equivalent to 18 billion movie downloads. The firm also predicts that Wi-Fi and femtocell networks will play a significant role in easing data traffic by carrying 63 percent of data traffic, or almost 9,000 petabytes.
The firm isn't predicting data growth as explosive as others but said that despite the practice of offloading data traffic, the migration of data traffic from fixed wired networks to mobile networks will aggravate the data load on mobile networks.
"It is important for network operators to be cognizant of the net impact that both offload and onload have on the total data traffic through the network," said the report's author Nitin Bhas. "So even though data offload alleviates some of the operator's network congestion, a significant proportion of the offload could itself be offset by fixed to mobile migration of data."
Juniper Research said Wi-Fi currently accounts for more than 90 percent of the data traffic that is offloaded, but femtocells will account for a steadily increasing portion over the next four years and both will provide a flexible solution that will co-exist.
For more:
- see this release
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