Global mobile data grew 133% in 2011, will double annually until 2015: Cisco

Cisco has released its annual report on global bandwidth usage, mobile and otherwise, and the statistics are astounding. Global mobile data traffic grew 133% in 2011 over the previous year, which itself doubled from 2009. In fact mobile data has increased by over 100% for four years in a row, and Cisco says there is no sign of slowdown in the future.

Smartphones, according to Cisco, used over 82% of global mobile traffic despite making up only 12% of handsets. No surprise there, clearly, especially as the proliferation of 3G and 4G networks pick up. What is surprising, however, is that 4G LTE users use on average 28 times more data than existing 3G users. Despite only making up 0.6% of global users, LTE devices use 6% of total traffic.

Another amazing statistic: mobile video traffic made up over 50% of the total for the first time in 2011. Android also surpassed iOS in total traffic for the same time period.

In 2011, the average smartphone user used 150MB of data, up from 55MB the year before. There were 34 million cell-connected tablets, each of which used 3.4 times the monthly traffic of a smartphone. By the end of 2012, 100 million smartphones will average over 1GB of data per month.

And finally, the most amazing statistic of all: by 2016, global monthly mobile data will hit 10 exabytes. An exabyte is 1 billion gigabytes, or 1 million terabytes. That’s 10 million terabytes of traffic per month.

The overview is quite humbling, and very eye-opening. We may think we are using a lot of data these days, but networks will be so overloaded by 2016, large cities will need to make significant infrastructure upgrades to allow for the increased traffic load. The average smartphone will use 2.6GB of data by 2016, up from 150MB today. 30% of traffic will be offloaded to fixed WiFi and Femtocell sites, but that still won’t be enough, says Cisco.

Check out the full rundown at Cisco.

Source: Electronista