Mobile Data - 40 times greater than today

Global mobile data traffic will reach 3.6 exabytes per month or an annual run rate of 40 exabytes by 2014, according to the Cisco Visual Networking Index report. I had to look up what an exabyte was in Wikipedia and this is in fact 1 billion gigabytes.

This is just under 40 times the volume used in 2009 and constitutes a compound annual growth rate of 108 percent. By 2014, there will be over 5 billion personal devices connecting to mobile networks and billions more machine-to-machine nodes, the study predicts. Mobile video will represent 66 percent of all mobile data traffic by 2014, increasing 66-fold from 2009 to 2014 – the highest growth rate of any mobile data application tracked in the report. Over the past year, global mobile data traffic increased by 160 percent to 90 petabytes per month, a growth rate 2.4 times faster than fixed broadband data traffic.

I looked up petabytes in Wikipedia and for some strange reason it is the same as exabytes so I am not sure if someone missed a zero or 10 zeros. Anyway the numbers are staggering. The average mobile broadband connection generates 1.3GB of traffic per month, and by 2014, this is expected to increase to 7GB. The study predicts that more than 400 million of the world’s internet users will access the network solely through a mobile connection by 2014. India has the highest country mobile data traffic growth rate of any country, with a CAGR of 222 percent for the forecast period, followed by China with 172 percent and South Africa at 156 percent CAGR.

With so much data, video and user content flying around, one has to wonder if you would have time to even consider paying for access to Rupert Murdochs newspapers, or any online news media when it can so easily be sourced elsewhere. In fact the internet will become it’s own editor with the truth on any news items coming through almost instantaneously with the right search criteria from real-time user services like facebook, twitter and now Google providing users the ability to update their current status.