Networking giant Cisco has today released its latest annual Visual Networking Index (VNI) forecast for global mobile internet traffic ( Mobile Broadband ), which reveals that mobile data usage has more than doubled over the past year to reach 597 Petabytes per month (0.6 Exabytes) in 2011 (up from 237 Petabytes in 2010). This is expected to increase 18-fold by 2016 to hit 10.8 Exabytes per month!

Elsewhere global mobile internet download speeds grew by 66% in 2011 and now average 315Kbps [0.3Mbps] (Kilobits per second), which is up from 189Kbps in 2010. The average mobile connection speed is expected to surpass 1Mbps (Megabits per second) in 2014, although Smartphone-only speeds have already hit 1.344Mbps.


Mobile video traffic (e.g. Netflix, YouTube, iPlayer) continues to be the primary data gobbler and accounted for 52% of all mobile internet usage by the end of 2011 (up from 49.8% in 2010); this could exceed 70% by 2016! Ordinary mobile website / data related usage made up the next largest block, while File Sharing and VoIP barely even registered.


The top 1% of mobile data subscribers were responsible for generating 24% of data traffic (down from 35% in 2010) and the average amount of traffic per Smartphone in 2011 was 150MB (MegaBytes) per month, up from 55MB in 2010. Non-Smartphone usage increased 2.3-fold to 4.3MB per month in 2011 (up from 1.9MB in 2010).

Smartphone's account for only 12% of total global handsets in use today, but they represent over 82% of total global handset traffic. By comparison mobile-connected Tablets (e.g. iPad) generated an average of 517MB per device and Laptops went even further to hit 2.1GB (GigaBytes) per month per device (up from 1.5GB in 2010).

It's also interesting to note that 10% of mobile devices were potentially IPv6 capable in 2011. That's still quite poor but not unexpected because many people will keep their phones for several years. Meanwhile the new generation of superfast 4G ( LTE ) services currently represent only 0.2% of mobile connections, yet they already account for 6% of mobile data traffic.