Cisco recently released its latest report titled "Visual Networking Index (VNI) Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update" and it provides some interesting insights about electronic gadgets usage. The report suggests that mobile data traffic is likely to increase at the rate of 78 percent annually during the period between 2011 and 2016. It also claims that by 2016, there will be about 10 billion devices globally, in comparison to human population of 7 billion. These devices will also be responsible for generating 10.8 exabytes of data traffic every month.
This massive amount of data is certainly going to put lots of pressure on communication infrastructure and it is high time for government and companies to start taking note of the gravity of situation. In an interview with Reuters, Mary Brown, director of government affairs for Cisco, said, "We are going to start to see quality-of-service issues arising in major metropolitan areas if we don’t act to add more spectrum to these mobile networks."
Video streaming is expected to be the biggest contributor towards increased traffic. It already accounts for about half of the mobile data traffic. This percentage is only set to increase with improvement in bandwidth and the advent of better phones and mobile devices. Videos are expected to generate 70 percent of the total data traffic by 2016.