Mobile data traffic will grow three times faster than fixed traffic in the period 2014-2019, driven by more devices and users as well as faster networks, according to the latest forecast from Cisco. Global mobile data traffic will reach an annual run rate of 292 billion GB by 2019, up from 30 billion in 2014.
The growth is driven by more mobile users, which are expected to grow from nearly 59 percent of the world population last year to 69 percent in 2019. Cisco predicts there will be 11.5 billion mobile-ready devices/connections in the world in 2019, including 8.3 billion personal mobile devices and 3.2 billion M2M connections (up from 7.4 billion total connections in 2014). The average global mobile network speed will increase 2.4 fold over the same period, from 1.7 Mbps in 2014 to 4.0 Mbps in 2019. By 2019, mobile video will represent 72 percent of global mobile data traffic, up from 55 percent in 2014.
Cisco highlighted two types of connection that will contribute more than phones to the growth in world traffic: wearables and M2M. Already in 2014, wearables generated six times more traffic per month than basic handsets, at 141 MB versus 22 MB, and the number of wearables in the world is expected to grow five-fold in the forecast period to 529 million in 2014. The average M2M module generated in 2014 three times more traffic per month than a basic handset, at 70 MB.
The roll-out of faster 4G mobile networks is another contributing factor to the growth in mobile data. 4G connections generated an average 2.2 GB of data per month last year, and this is expected to grow to 5.5 GB by 2019, or over five times more than a non-4G connection. At the same time, the number of 4G connections globally will grow 18-fold, from 459 million in 2014 to 3 billion by 2019. By the end of the forecast period, 4G connections are expected to account for 68 percent of total mobile data traffic.
Cisco's latest forecast suggests a slowdown in the growth in the share of mobile data traffic offloaded to Wi-Fi networks. In 2014, 46 percent of total mobile data traffic was offloaded; by 2019, it expects 54 percent of mobile data traffic will be offloaded. However, Wi-Fi networks will carry an increasing amount of voice traffic, thanks to improved carrier-grade systems for VoWiFi. The report expects more call minutes over Wi-Fi networks than LTE networks in 2019 and more data traffic from VoWi-Fi (10.8 PB/year) than VoLTE (10.7 PB/year) by 2018.
