At the end of March, I’ll be traveling to Hong Kong to deliver a keynote presentation at SingTel’s CIO Day 2012. In preparation for the talk, I recently reviewed Cisco’s Global Data Traffic Forecast Update for 2012-2016. Here are ten interesting facts CIO’s need to be contemplating today:
1. Monthly global mobile data will surpass 10 exabytes in 2016. (This is more than all of the data produced in the entire year of 2011).
2. Over 100 million smartphone users will belong to the “gigabyte club” (over 1 GB per month) by the end of the year.
3. In 2012, the number of mobile-connected devices will exceed the world’s population. As the Internet of Things matures this number will only grow and, as it does, it’ll have profound effect on how business is done around the world.
4. Mobile network connection speeds will increase 9-fold by 2016.
5. In 2016, 4G smartphones will be 6 percent of connections but will be responsible for generating 36 percent of all traffic.
6. Two-thirds of global mobile traffic will be video by 2016.
7. The number of mobile tablets tripled in 2011. The number will continue to expand and by 2016 mobile tablets will generate as much traffic as was produced in all of 2012.
8. In 2011, only 10 percent of mobile devices were IPv6-capable. By 2016, this figure will increase to 34 percent.
9. In the Middle East and China mobile data traffic will more than double in 2012.
10. So what does all of this mean? For starters, CIOs have to stop focusing on “the tip of the iceberg” they can see and begin worrying more about that huge block that is lurking just below sea-level. Why? Because it has the potential to sink your Titantic-sized enterprise if you’re not careful.
