Nearly half of all internet traffic will come from smartphones in five years, but the majority of the traffic will still run over fixed networks, according to the latest forecasts from Cisco. The company's latest Visual Networking Index for the mobile market estimates that 60 percent of traffic from mobile devices was offloaded to fixed networks in 2016, and this will still be around 63 percent in 2021, at the end of its five-year forecast period. Smartphones accounted for 16 percent of total global IP traffic last year, and Cisco expects this will grow to a 48 percent share in 2021, making smartphones the biggest source of internet traffic, more than PCs.
The relatively high price of data services over mobile networks and their capacity constraints are limiting how much smartphone traffic they carry. Nevertheless, Cisco still expects an exponential increase in internet traffic on cellular networks, at a CAGR of 47 percent over five years to reach 49 exabytes per month in 2021. That's an annual run rate of over half a zettabyte (half a trillion GB). Traffic on mobile networks will continue to grow twice as fast as fixed, taking mobile networks' share of total global IP traffic to 20 percent at the end of the forecast period, versus 8 percent last year.
5G will still have only a small role by the end of the forecast period, at an estimated 1.5 percent of total mobile traffic. Cisco expects only 0.2 percent of mobile connections will use 5G in 2021, equal to around 25 million. However, each 5G connection will generate nearly 30 GB per month, an amount 4.7 times higher than the average 4G connection. All technologies combined, the average mobile network connection speed is expected to grow to 20.4 Mbps by 2021 from 6.8 Mbps in 2016.
