Source: CW | By Michael Cooney
Cisco: By 2022, mobile will represent nearly 20 percent of all global IP traffic, fueled in part by the Internet of Things.
The popularity of mobile devices will continue its dramatic growth over the next four years as new technologies kick in with higher density and bandwidth, according to Cisco’s annual Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update (2017 – 2022) released this week.
Perhaps the key forecast: Mobile traffic will be on the verge of reaching an annual run rate of a zettabyte by the end of 2022. In that timeframe, mobile traffic will represent nearly 20 percent of global IP traffic and will reach 930 exabytes annually – nearly 113 times more than all mobile traffic generated globally in 2012. (An exabyte is 1,000,000,000 gigabytes and a zettabyte is 1,000 exabytes.)
The Cisco Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update is part the company’s overarching Visual Networking Index (VNI) that tracks and forecasts all manner of networking trends and directions culled from its own network traffic reports and independent analyst forecasts.
Other mobility predictions from Cisco:
• By 2022, there will be more than 12 billion mobile-ready devices and IoT connections, up from about 9 billion in 2017.
• By 2022, mobile networks will support more than 8 billion personal mobile devices and 4 billion IoT connections.
• The average mobile network speeds globally will increase more than three-fold from 8.7Mbps in 2017 to 28.5Mbps by 2022.
• By 2022, mobile video will represent 79 percent of global mobile data traffic, up from 59 percent in 2017.
• By 2022, 79 percent of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video, up from 59 percent in 2017.
• Mobile offload exceeded cellular traffic by a ton in 2017; 54 percent of total mobile data traffic was offloaded onto the fixed-line network through Wi-Fi or femtocell in 2017.
• In 2017, 4G already carried 72 percent of the total mobile traffic and represented the largest share of mobile data traffic by network type. It will continue to grow faster than other networks, however the percentage share will go down slightly to 71 percent of all mobile data traffic by 2022.
