BOSTON and SAN JOSE – Two reports issued this week both predict that the surge in mobile data traffic will not slow any time soon, due in large part to the proliferation of mobile-ready devices and widespread mobile video content consumption.
Allot Communications’ MobileTrends: Global Mobile Broadband Traffic Report found that worldwide mobile data bandwidth usage increased by approximately 72% during the second half of 2009, due in large part to over-the-top applications such as YouTube and Skype.
The Cisco Visual Networking Index Global Mobile Data Forecast for 2009-2014 projects that annual global mobile data traffic will reach 3.6 exabytes per month (or an annual run rate of 40 exabytes) by 2014. This equates to a 39-fold increase from 2009 to 2014, a compound annual growth rate of 108% percent.
Allot’s report said that HTTP streaming continues to be the fastest growing application with a 99% increase, and that its global mobile broadband share grew by 50% between the second and fourth quarter of 2009. HTTP downloads, which grew by 73%, have become a feasible alternative for massive file sharing, it continued.
By 2014, Cisco estimates that there will be over 5 billion personal devices connecting to mobile networks, and billions more machine-to-machine nodes. Mobile video will represent 66% of all mobile data traffic by 2014, a 66-fold increase from 2009 to 2014, which the company says is the highest growth rate of any mobile data application they’ve tracked.
The Allot MobileTrends Report, an on-going initiative to track global IP application and bandwidth usage and growth in mobile broadband operators worldwide, based its findings on anonymous data collected over the second half of 2009 from mobile operators worldwide with a combined user base of more than 180 million subscribers.
The Cisco VNI Global Mobile Data Forecast methodology relies upon various independent analyst forecasts as well as real-world mobile data usage studies.
