SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 4 — Before the end of the decade, mobile data traffic levels are going to see a ten-fold increase thanks to bigger smartphones, smarter cars and the proliferation of wearables.

The Cisco Visual Networking Index Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast for 2014-2019 finds that monthly global traffic levels will hit 24.3 Exabytes, up from 2.5 Exabytes in 2014.

To put that into some sort of perspective, an Exabyte is 1 billion gigabytes (or the combined storage of 62.5 million entry-level iPhone 6 smartphones), and the lion’s share of all of this new mobile data flowing over networks will be due to what Cisco calls smart connections, which include phones, tablets, laptops and increasingly machine-to-machine (M2M) connections such as in cars with infotainment systems that feature integrated web access.

In 2014, 88 per cent of global mobile data traffic was due to smart connections, and by 2019 they will account for 97 per cent.

Much of this increase is being caused by the widespread global adoption of the smartphone and therefore the growing demand for faster 3G and 4G connections.

But it’s not just handsets, tablets and notebooks that support mobile internet connections. Cisco forecasts that the number of connected wearable devices globally will have hit 578 million by 2019.

But as well as the types of devices, the way in which consumers use gadgets is also changing. Bigger phones with faster 4G connections mean that they are the perfect mobile multimedia consumption devices and by 2019 72 per cent of mobile data traffic is expected to be mobile video.

It will take until 2019 for 4G/LTE to account for 26 per cent of all mobile connections (3 billion devices) but by that time, it will also account for 68 per cent of total mobile data.

“The ongoing adoption of more powerful mobile devices and wider deployments of emerging M2M applications, combined with broader access to faster wireless networks, will be key contributors to significant mobile traffic growth in the coming years.

This mobile-centric environment will give service providers a new landscape of challenges and opportunities to innovatively deliver a variety of mobile services and experiences to consumers and business users as the Internet of Everything (IoE) continues to take shape,” said Doug Webster, Vice President of Service Provider Products and Solutions Marketing, Cisco, of the report’s findings. — AFP-Relaxnews