Cisco: Mobile traffic to hit 75 exabytes in 2015

By 2015 Cisco expects "petabytes" to be a measurement of the past, estimating mobile traffic to hit 6.3 exabytes a month or 75 exabytes a year.

About 1.5 billion smartphones users that came on board in the past year were almost solely responsible for tripling mobile data, according to Cisco's figures.

Smartphones only accounted for 13 percent of all mobile phones in use, but were responsible for 78 percent of total mobile traffic on global networks.

Smartphones alone generated 51 petabytes of mobile traffic every month in 2010, Cisco claimed.

Tablets and laptops were also a heavy burden for mobile networks. Last year there were 3 million tablets connected to mobile networks, each consuming 405 MB per month -- five times the 79 MB a month that smartphones did.

Laptops were even heavier data users at 1.7 GB per month.

The increase in mobile traffic by 2015 would be generated by around 7 billion "mobile-connected" devices, including machine-to-machine devices for applications such as smart networks.

It was expected that over this period, smartphone data consumption would rise from 79 MB to 1.3 GB a month, according to Cisco.

While mobile traffic was forecast to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 92 per cent between 2010 and 2015, fixed line networks would remain critical from an infrastructure standpoint.

In 2010, fixed line networks carried 14.3 of the 51 petabytes generated by mobile devices last year, but Cisco predicted fixed lines to carry 800 million terabytes of mobile data traffic by 2015.