More Mobile Devices than People Soon: Cisco

The Internet highway may start looking like a proverbial New York traffic jam at rush hour soon. Feel free to substitute any town you like because Cisco says there’s going to be a faster-than-expected 18x surge in worldwide mobile data traffic between 2011 and 2016. That’s when mobile cloud traffic should account for 71% of total data traffic, or 10.3 exabytes a month, up from a mere 269 petabytes a month now, outgrowing global fixed data traffic by 3x. That’s like 33 billion DVDs or 4.3 quadrillion MP3 files. There are supposed to be an estimated 10 billion mobile connections by 2016 – more than the 7.3 billion people on earth by then – or more than eight billion handheld or personal mobile-ready devices and nearly two billion machine-to-machine connections, such as GPS systems in cars, asset tracking systems in shipping and manufacturing and medical applications for making patient records more available.

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