Mobile Internet Stats

Every year, Cisco Systems, the company that manufactures a majority of the hardware that runs the internet, compiles vital statistics for its networks worldwide.

According to the Visual Networking Index (VNI) Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, a part of Cisco's yearly forecast, smartphone data usage is exploding by over doubling (2.3x) the previous year. This trend is not new either. Over the past four years, the doubling trend has burdened service providers that are staggering to keep up with demand. When you look at the magnitude of data consumption, it is not hard to believe why unlimited data plans are coming to an end. Last year's mobile traffic alone was over eight times the traffic on the entire internet in 2000. Much of the consumption comes from the increase in video streaming sites, which make up 52% of the data downloaded.

Even with introduction of tiered data plans, the top 1% of users use 24% of the bandwidth. By 2016, global mobile data will have increased 18x since last year, posing a huge problem to existing infrastructure. In raw numbers, that amounts to 10.8 exabytes per month. For those who have not heard "exabytes" before, 1 exabyte is 1,000,000,000,000 megabytes. Service providers will have to find ingenious solutions to handling this explosive growth.



Source:http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/ns827/white_paper_c11-520862.html