10 Billion by 2016
By Todd Haselton on February 20, 2012 in News
There will be 10 billion smartphones and tablets on earth by 2016, according to a recent research report from Cisco, far more than the United Nation’s projected human population of 7.3 billion people. By those figures, Cisco predicts there will be 1.4 mobile gadgets per person by 2016, too, although that figure will no doubt depend on the growth of mobile use in emerging markets by that time and whether or not our devices begin to converge faster than they already have.
Cisco also said that traffic from smartphones will increase by a factor of 50 by 2016; traffic from tablets is expected to increase by a factor of 62 by the same year. If you think you consume a lot of data now, check out this figure: Cisco argues that we’ll consume about 130 exabytes of data in 2016. That’s equivalent to 4.3 quadrillion MP3 files, 813 quadrillion text messages or 33 billion DVDs. An exabyte is 1,000,000 terabytes.
“By 2016, 60 percent of mobile users — 3 billion people worldwide — will belong to the ‘Gigabyte Club,’ each generating more than one gigabyte of mobile data traffic per month,” Cisco’s vice president of product and solutions marketing Suraj Shetty said. “By contrast, in 2011, only one-half percent of mobile users qualified. This impressive growth in mobile traffic will be driven by more powerful devices, notably smartphones and tablets, using faster networks, such as 4G and Wi-Fi, to access more applications, particularly data-intensive video.”
The research report also suggested that mobile data speeds will increase nine-fold between 2011 and 2016 and that mobile video will comprise 71% of all mobile traffic by 2016.
Cisco argued that the average mobile smartphone connection speed was 1.31Mbps in 2011 but that the average speed in 2016 will be 5.12Mbps in 2016. That makes sense on a global scale but it’s a hard pill for us to swallow if we’re considering the U.S. market, though, considering we consistently see data speeds from AT&T and Verizon’s 4G LTE networks that already exceed those figures.
The results of the current forecast represent increased amounts of traffic for the years 2011 to 2015, reflecting faster-than-expected growth from the previous Cisco VNI mobile forecast released in February 2011. In last year’s study, 2011 mobile Internet traffic was forecast to grow at 131 percent. This year, actual mobile Internet growth 2011 was estimated to be 133 percent.