It’s rare to find someone accessing the internet through a wired desktop these days. Most of us are on the go and using one or more mobile devices – such as, laptops, phones, and tablets – to do work or connect to “our social network”. The point is that consumers are consuming information anytime, anywhere, and anyway. According to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2010–2015, “global mobile data traffic grew 2.6-fold in 2010, nearly tripling for the third year in a row.”
The growth has been and will continue to be quite incredible – “Last year’s mobile data traffic was three times the size of the entire global Internet in 2000. Global mobile data traffic in 2010 (237 petabytes per month) was over three times greater than the total global Internet traffic in 2000 (75 petabytes per month)” – Cisco. According to ABI Research, the surge in video will drive global data traffic to more than 60,000 petabytes in 2016.
What does this mean for service providers and equipment manufacturers? They will need to find more cost-effective methods to provide higher bandwidth and more reliable coverage while discovering better ways to monetize their data traffic since it is becoming an even more dominant part of their traffic over traditional voice traffic. Incidentally, some of the consumers of mobile data traffic aren’t even human – as the “Internet of Things” such as security, healthcare, inventory & fleet management and telematics take hold.
This explosion in data traffic will continue to demand more equipment to support the internet backbone and the server farms that feed it. We will see complex heterogeneous network topologies emerge in order to meet the specific demands of the Mobile Internet community.
Spansion is well positioned to support the demands of the Telecom and Networking industry as it makes these transitions. Over the coming weeks, I’ll highlight the trends happening throughout the new heterogenous networks and how Flash memory is playing a role.
Anthony,
I find the ‘Internet of Things’ data quite amusing. Could you elaborate on it a bit more? What share of Internet traffic is controlled by ‘Internet of Things’ now and what % is it poised to cover in the near future?
Rahul
I haven’t seen any solid data on the percentage of traffic for “things,” but Cisco did an interesting white paper on this subject and projects 50 billion connected devices by 2020 – almost 7 times the world population. It will definitely be a lot of data. Even cows could be connected. They cite a Dutch start-up who implants sensors in the ears of cattle so farmers can monitor health and track movements. Each cow will generate 200 megabytes of information a year. With examples like these, it is hard to gauge where we’re going.
Here’s a link to the Cisco paper, The Internet of Things: How the Next Evolution of the Internet Is Changing Everything – http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac79/docs/innov/IoT_IBSG_0411FINAL.pdf.
Amusing. Thanks a lot for clarification Antony and for the link.
I can see the opportunity in the networking of these 50 billion connected devices! Probably, Spansion has a role to play there.
Best,
Rahul