By 2019 There will be 5.2 billion global mobile users, up from 4.3 billion in 2014, according to a wide-ranging new forecast from Cisco.
The report, published this week, also forecasts that by 2019 there will be nearly 3.9 billion global Internet users – more than 51 percent of the world’s population – up from 2.8 billion in 2014.
Globally, the average fixed broadband connection speed will also increase 2.2-fold, from 20.3 Mbps in 2014 to 42.5 Mbps by 2019, whilst video will represent 80 percent of all traffic by 2019, up from 67 percent in 2014.
Content delivery networks – the system of servers deployed in multiple data centers across the Internet – will carry over half of Internet traffic by 2019 as people increasingly turn to online platforms to consume content. This means annual global IP traffic will surpass the zettabyte threshold in 2016, and the two zettabyte threshold in 2019.
A zettabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.
It would take an individual over five million years to watch the amount of video that will cross global IP networks each month in 2019. Every second, nearly a million minutes of video content will cross the network by 2019.
Global IP traffic has increased more than fivefold in the past five years, and will increase nearly threefold over the next five years. Overall, IP traffic will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23 percent from 2014 to 2019, the report’s authors predict.
Cisco also forecasts that there will be 11.5 billion mobile-ready devices and connections in the next four years, more than 4 billion more than there were in 2014
