Cisco has released its closely-watched Visual Networking Index report, and while the networking giant continues to predict double-digit growth rates for mobile data traffic, it is scaling back its forecast somewhat. Cisco forecasts global traffic of 2.6 exabytes per month for 2014, down from last year’s forecast of 2.8 Eb per month for 2014. In 2013, Cisco says mobile operators handled 1.5 Eb per month, off just slightly from its forecast of 1.6 Eb per month.
Mobile data traffic grew 81% in 2013, and Cisco says it would have grown 98% if operators had not been able to offload traffic to Wi-Fi connections and femtocells. Globally, 45% of total mobile data traffic was offloaded onto the fixed network through Wi-Fi or femtocells in 2013. Carriers offloaded 1.2 exabytes of mobile data traffic onto the fixed network each month.
Tablets made a big impact in 2013. Mobile data traffic per tablet was 1,374 megabytes per month, compared to 529 MB per month per smartphone. The number of mobile-connected tablets increased 2.2-fold to 92 million.
While tablets are disproportionate data users, the individuals with the biggest data appetites do not consume as much of the total as they did in previous years. Four years ago, the top 1% of data users generated more than half of all mobile data traffic; now the top 1% generate 10% of the traffic.
Cisco says that globally there are now seven billion connected devices, but just 21% of those are smart devices. However, smart devices accounted for 88% of mobile data traffic. On average, a smart device generated 29 times more traffic than a non-smart device in 2013, according to the VNI report. The report also looked at handsets exclusive of other mobile devices and found that smartphones represented only 27% of total global handsets in use last year, but represented 95% of total global handset traffic.
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