Yesterday I wrote about our love affair with television. One of the factors that is fuelling the growth of TV in its many guises globally is mobile connectivity, which is going stratospheric, shattering all kinds of limits. In an always-on world our smallest screens wire us to hot hubs, free us to shift to the edge, and unshackle enterprise and entertainment. Here are seven big trends to ponder next time you pick up your iPhone, furnished by a Cisco report earlier this year:
- Growth is rapacious. Global mobile traffic nearly tripled for the third year in a row in 2010. At 237 petabytes per month, traffic was three times the size of the entire global internet in 2000.
- Sisomo is taking over. Mobile video traffic will exceed 50 percent of all mobile data traffic for the first time in 2011. It’ll be two-thirds by 2015.
- Nothing is impossible. There are 48 million people in the world who have mobile phones, even though they do not have electricity at home. The off-grid, on-net population will reach 138 million by 2015.
- Competition is heating up. At the start of 2010 iPhone use was at least four times higher than that of any other smartphone platform. That’s changing fast. Towards the end of the year, iPhone use was only 1.75 times higher than that of number two, Android.
- Why stop, ever? There will be 788 million mobile-only Internet users by 2015, up 56-fold from 14 million at the end of 2010.
- There’s plenty to go around. There will be over 7.1 billion mobile-connected devices in 2015 – roughly equivalent to the world’s population by then (7.2 billion).
- Goodbye, megabyte. The average smartphone will generate 1.3 gigabytes of traffic per month in 2015, 16 times more than the 2010 average of 79 megabytes per month. Growth in the next five years will see global mobile traffic reach 6.3 exabytes per month by 2015. How big is that? It’s been suggested that every word ever spoken by human beings would equate to five exabytes. So six every month is a lot of chatter!
