According to the latest analysis of global mobile traffic by the network company Cisco Systems, mobile devices will outnumber humans by the end of this year. Cisco also predicts that by 2016, there will be 10 billion mobile-connected devices around the world and networks will be carrying 130 exabytes of data each year. (That’s the equivalent of 33 billion DVDs.) On the other hand, there will only be 7.3 billion humans on the planet at that time.
To get a further idea of how rapidly this market is expanding, consider this: the report also says that mobile data traffic in 2011 was eight times the size of the global Internet in 2000.
It’s easy to scoff at this by thinking that the Internet was still in its infancy in 2000. But the reality is that it had already ramped up and become a regular part of our daily lives by that time. So when you consider that there is already 8X as much traffic on mobile platforms alone, it’s clear this industry is accelerating at a pace we have never experienced before.
Here are some other key finding from the study:Average smartphone usage nearly tripled in 2011, from 55 MB per month in 2010 to 150 MB per month.
Smartphones represent only 12 percent of global handsets in use today, but they handle over 82 percent of total global handset traffic.
In 2011, the typical smartphone generated 35 times more mobile data traffic (150 MB per month) than the typical basic-feature cell phone (which generated only 4.3 MB per month of mobile data traffic).
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