Online Video to Push Mobile Broadband Traffic to 134 Exabytes by 2017

Cisco’s latest forecast has predicted that online video services will represent 66% of global Mobile Broadband traffic by 2017 (up from 51% in 2012), which will help to push total mobile data use from 0.9 Exabytes per month (i.e. 885 Petabytes) now to 11.2 EB in just five years’ time and outpace global fixed data traffic.

The Mobile Visual Networking Index (VNI) forecast for 2012 to 2017 notes that global mobile data traffic will outpace global fixed data traffic by a factor of three, which reflects a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 66%. As you’d expect Smartphones, laptops and tablet computers will fuel 93% of global mobile data traffic by 2017.

Similarly total mobile users will rise from 4.3 billion in 2012 to 5.2 billion by 2017 and the average global mobile network speed will jump from 0.5Mbps (Megabits per second) in 2012 to 3.9 Mbps over the same period (wifi excluded). Curiously Smartphone connection speeds seem to do a lot better.

It’s also interesting to note that the latest 4G services will account for 10% of connections by 2017 but 45% of total traffic (5 Exabytes per month) and 44% of all global mobile devices could potentially be capable of connecting to an IPv6 mobile network by the same date.

At present 2G services still support 76% of global mobile devices/M2M connections (falling to 33% in 2017), while 3G supports 23% (rising to 57% in 2017) and 4G supported just 1% (hitting 10% in 2017 as above).

In addition 33% of total mobile data traffic was offloaded onto the fixed network through WiFi or femtocell solutions in 2012.