CISCO: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast

Mar 22, 2009 at 8:24 PM

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The engineers from Cisco are doing a brilliant job in provision the infrastructure to today's data consumption.
Now, Cisco's researcher come into play and predict a strong groth of mobile data usage, as we can see today with iPhones (iPhoneOS), gPhones (Android) and soon pPhones (webOS).

The iPhone is said to produce an equivalent data conspumption of 30 2G/3G handsets alltogether. A notebook produces even 15 times more than the iPhone.

They not only present nice graphics to illustrate their arguments, this also indicates pretty much what carriers should be aware of in the near future - until 2013.
According to Cisco, mobile data usage is roughly by 125 TB (TeraBytes) per month, said to be strongly increasing to 2000 TB (2 ExaBytes ) until 2013.

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There are also demographoc factors, which have impact on data usage. Europe is identified as offering afforable data plans to sbscribers and this data usage is predicted to grow rapidly and stronger than Northern Amercian data consumption. The Asia Pacific region covering Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, Honk Kong, Malaysia, etc. has the biggest consumption and in details it surely is Taiwan and Korea which are the key driver.

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Globally, mobile data traffic will double every year through 2013, increasing 66 times between 2008 and 2013. Mobile data traffic will grow at a CAGR of 131 percent between 2008 and 2013, reaching over 2 exabytes per month by 2013.
Mobile data traffic will grow from 1 petabyte per month to 1 exabyte per month in half the time it took fixed data traffic to do so. In the 7 years from 2005 to 2012, mobile data traffic will have increased a thousand-fold. The Internet grew from 1 petabyte per month to 1 exabyte per month in 14 years.
Almost 64 percent of the world's mobile traffic will be video by 2013. Mobile video will grow at a CAGR of 150 percent between 2008 and 2013. Mobile video has the highest growth rate of any application category measured within the Cisco VNI Forecast at this time.
Mobile broadband handsets with higher than 3G speeds and laptop aircards will drive over 80 percent of global mobile traffic by 2013. A single high-end phone like the iPhone/Blackberry generates more data traffic than 30 basic-feature cell phones. A laptop aircard generates more data traffic than 450 basic-feature cell phones.
Latin America will have the strongest growth of any region at 166 percent CAGR, followed by Asia Pacific (APAC) at 146 percent.
APAC will account for one-third of all mobile data traffic by 2013. Together, Western Europe and APAC will account for over 60 percent of global mobile data traffic.
Western Europe will have the most mobile video traffic of all regions in 2013. Mobile video will account for 73 percent of mobile data traffic in Western Europe.