Mobile data traffic to grow by 66 per cent a year to 2017

Global mobile data traffic is forecast to increase by 66 per cent Compounded Annual Growth rate (CAGR) or 13-fold by 2017, reaching 11.2 exabytes (one quintillion bytes) per month, or 134 exabytes a year, by that year, according to Cisco.
The company expects 46 per cent of all cellular traffic to be off-loaded from fixed or Wi-Fi by 2017 (9.6 Exabytes a month), compared with 33 per cent (428 petabytes a month) in 2012. LTE is likely to support nearly 10 per cent of all mobile connections by 2017.

Continued strong growth in the mobile Internet connections, both personal devices and M2M applications, which will exceed the UN’s world population estimated of 7.6 billion.
Cisco explains that 134 exabytes is the equivalent of three trillion video clips, or one clip daily from each person on Earth over one year.

Mobile data is being driven by an increase in mobile users (5.2 billion by 2017 vs 4.3 billion in 2012), rise in mobile connections (10 billion, including 1.7 billion M2M by 2017 vs 7 billion in total in 2012), faster mobile speeds (3.9 Mbps vs 0.5Mbps), and more mobile video, expected to account for 66 per cent of all mobile data traffic by 2017, versus 51 per cent in 2012.
Cisco expects M2M traffic, including car GPS, asset tracking, medical applications, etc, to account for five per cent of global mobile data traffic in 2017.

The MEA region is expected to 77 per cent CAGR mobile data growth between 2012-2017, Asia-Pacific 76 per cent, Latin America 67 per cent, Central and Eastern Europe 66 per cent, North America 56 per cent and Western Europe 50 per cent.