Cisco has updated its forecast for the growth in mobile internet traffic and now expects a compound annual growth rate of 78 percent over the next five years. Worldwide mobile data traffic is expected to reach 10.8 exabytes per month, or an annual run rate of 130 exabytes, by 2016, driven by growth in the number of internet-enabled devices and demand for streaming services. In the period 2011−2016, Cisco anticipates that global mobile data traffic will outgrow global fixed data traffic by three times. The number of mobile internet-connected devices is also expected to exceed the world's population in 2016, at an estimated 10 billion (including around 2 billion M2M modules) versus the UN's projection of 7.3 billion people in the world. Tablets are expected to lead the growth in mobile internet traffic and alone account for 1 exabyte of traffic per month in 2016. Other factors driving mobile internet growth are rising mobile network speeds, which Cisco expects will grow from an average 315 Kbps in 2011 to 2.87Mbps in 2016, and growing demand for mobile video, which will account for 71 percent of all mobile data traffic by 2016. The above forecasts include only cellular network traffic. If all types of mobility are included, such as cellular traffic, traffic offloaded from cellular networks and fixed/Wi-Fi traffic generated from portable devices, the total amount of traffic would be more than four times the amount Cisco forecast for cellular traffic alone in 2016. Cisco estimates the proportion of traffic offloaded to fixed/Wi-Fi networks will decrease to 80 percent by 2015, from 94.2 percent in 2011. However the volume of mobile device traffic on fixed/Wi-fi networks will still be more than five times that on cellular networks.
