Cisco: Nearly 10-fold Global Mobile Data Traffic Growth Over Next Five Years

Press Release - Feb 26, 2015

Cisco® Visual Networking Index™ (VNI) Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast for 2014 to 2019 revealing that in five years, 97 percent of global mobile data traffic will be considered "smart" traffic - with advanced computing/multi-media capabilities and a minimum of 3G connectivity. According to Albert Chai, Country Manager for Cisco in Malaysia, the nation is facing similar growth of mobile data traffic driven largely by the emerging internet savvy generation as we usher the age of the Internet of Everything (IoE) where people, data, processes, and things are more connected.

Albert Chai, Country Manager, Cisco Malaysia

Key Global Mobile Data Traffic Drivers

From 2014 to 2019, Cisco anticipates that global mobile traffic growth will outpace global fixed traffic growth by a factor of three. Trends driving mobile data traffic growth include:

• More mobile users: By 2019, there will be 5.2 billion mobile users (up from 4.3 billion in 2014). In 2014, nearly 59 percent of the world's population (7.2 billion people) was comprised of mobile users; by 2019, more than 69 percent of the world's population (7.6 billion people) will be mobile users.
• More mobile connections: By 2019, there will be approximately 11.5 billion mobile-ready devices/connections, including 8.3 billion personal mobile devices and 3.2 billion M2M connections (up from 7.4 billion total mobile-ready devices and M2M connections in 2014).
• Faster mobile speeds: Average global mobile network speeds will increase 2.4 fold from 2014 (1.7 Mbps) to 2019 (4.0 Mbps).
• More mobile video: By 2019, mobile video will represent 72 percent of global mobile data traffic (up from 55 percent in 2014).

Opportunities:

• Increase in Mobile M2M Connections (and Wearable Devices)
• Increase in 4G Connectivity
• Wi-Fi Offload Traffic Surpasses Cellular Traffic
• Voice-over-Wi-Fi (VoWi-Fi) Surpasses Voice-over-LTE (VoLTE)
• Growth of Mobile Cloud Traffic