More Users, More Devices Mean Mobile Traffic Will Surge, Cisco Says

Cisco Systems predicts an increase in the use of mobile device and mobile networks by 2020, and that more than 5 billion people will have mobile devices by then.

By 2020, data traffic running across mobile networks worldwide will hit almost 367 exabytes a year, an eightfold increase from the 44 exabytes in 2015.

According to Cisco, it’s 367 times more traffic than what was generated in 2000, and equivalent to 81 trillion images—such as those on Instagram—or 7 trillion video clips (such as on YouTube), or more than 2.5 video clips per day per person for a year.

Last year, there were 4.8 billion people in the world using mobile devices. That will jump to 5.5 billion by 2020, about 70 percent of the expected population by that year. The number of global mobile users is growing twice as fast as the global population.

The number of mobile connections will jump from 7.9 billion last year to 11.6 billion in 2020. Of those, 8.5 billion will be personal devices and 3.1 billion machine-to-machine (M2M) connections.

By 2020, 72 percent of those mobile devices and connections will be smart systems (twice that of last year), with smartphones dominating the mobile traffic. They will account for 81 percent of total global mobile traffic by 2020, up from 76 percent in 2015.

At the rate mobile phones—including “phablets”—are proliferating, by 2020 more people will have mobile phones (5.4 billion) than electricity (5.3 billion), running water (3.5 billion) and cars (2.8 billion).

Global M2M connections will make up 26.4 percent of mobile-connected devices in 2020, generating 6.7 percent of all mobile traffic. The number of wearables will grow sixfold during that time, with more than 600 million such devices in use by 2020. There were 97 million last year.

Last year, video accounted for 55 percent of all mobile traffic. By 2020, that number will jump to 75 percent.

Cisco officials said the growth in 4G networks was faster than they had expected. By 2020, 4G connections will account for 40.5 percent of all mobile connections, an increase from 13.7 percent last year. 4G traffic will grow by 13 times between 2015 and 2020.

3G connections will bypass 2G connections by 2017, while by 2020, 4G will surpass all other connections, something Cisco officials didn’t expect to have happen until a year later.

The average global mobile network speeds will grow 3.2 times between 2015—when it was 2.0M bps—and 2020, when it will be 6.5M bps. 4G adoption worldwide will be the key reason for this.

The number of WiFi hotspots will grow sevenfold, from 64 million in 2015 to 432 million by 2020. Home hotspots will go from 57 million last year to 423 million in 2020.

Last year, monthly WiFi offload traffic hit 3.9 exabytes, exceeding monthly mobile/cellular traffic (3.7 exabytes) for the first time. By 2020, 38.1 exabytes of WiFi offload traffic will be generated each month, compared with 30.6 exabytes of mobile/cellular traffic.

This year, VoWiFi will exceed voice over LTE (VoLTE) in the number of minutes used, and by 2020, VoWiFi minutes of use will account for 53 percent of all mobile IP voice traffic.

Sixty-six percent of mobile devices and connections will be IPv6-capable in 2020, up from 36 percent last year. In addition, IPv6 traffic will account for 54 percent of total mobile data traffic in 2020, an increase from 13 percent in 2015.

In those two regions, mobile data traffic will grow 15 times between 2015 and 2020. Asia-Pacific will see ninefold growth, followed by Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America each at eight times and North America and Western Europe at six times.