Millions more devices will become internet-connected within the next few years, according to new research from Cisco.
The networking giant's latest Mobile Visual Networking Index (VNI) Forecast estimates that there will be more than 12 billion mobile devices connected devices across the world by 2022 - up from nine billion today.
Roughly eight billion of those will be personal devices, with the remaining four billion being IoT devices.
Consequently, that means that mobile traffic will also experience significant growth. Right now, we’re expecting a zettabyte of data for the period of 2017 – 2022. By 2022, mobile traffic will account for some 20 per cent of global IP traffic and will reach 930 exabytes, every year.
That is, according to the report, 113 times more than all global mobile traffic generated just ten years ago.
Telcos will see this as an opportunity and improve their mobile network performance. With that in mind, we can expect mobile network speeds to increase more than three times, from 8.7 Mbps two years ago, to 28.5 Mbps by 2022. 5G will play a major role in achieving this growth.
“As global mobile traffic approaches the zettabyte era, we believe that 5G and WiFi will coexist as necessary and complementary access technologies, offering key benefits to our enterprise and service provider customers to extend their architectures,” said Jonathan Davidson, senior vice president and general manager, Service Provider Business, Cisco.
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