SAN FRANCISCO – By 2020, 5.4 billion people around the world will have a phone, more people than will have electricity, running water or cars on the road. This sobering prediction comes from Cisco’s annual report on mobile traffic growth.
Cisco’s report forecasts a tenfold growth in mobile data traffic to 366.8 exabytes by 2020. What is 366.8 exabytes? That’s the equivalent of 81 trillion Instagram photos. Phones also will make up 81 percent of total mobile traffic.
Just for the record, the report said 5.4 billion people will have mobile phones, 5.3 billion people will have electricity, 3.5 billion will have running water and 2.8 billion cars will be on the road. Roughly 7.4 billion people live on planet Earth.
In total, Cisco estimates that there will be 11.6 billion mobile-ready devices in 2020, up from 7.9 billion last year. The company believes wearable devices and machine-to-machine connections will continue to drive that number up.
The year 2020 is when many in the industry expect next-generation, superfast 5G wireless technology to truly kick off in wide scale, which should jump-start both wireless speeds and the type of devices that get a connection.
The global average network speed will more than triple to 6.5 megabits per second, Cisco said. Many developed countries with modern LTE networks already exceed that. The US carriers, for instance, now average 9.9 megabits per second.
But the rise in the global average will have a major impact on developing countries where the mobile infrastructure is still in its infancy. The Middle East and Africa are expected to have the highest growth rate in mobile data with a 15-fold increase. By that time, more than 75 percent of the world’s mobile data will be video.
