The latest data in the Cisco’s Mobile Visual Networking Index are here. Of course most interesting for us at UWP are the figure for mobile data traffic volume growth for next 5 year period 2014-2019. The estimates are clearly down from the previous period’s almost 100% growth. Aggregate growth of the whole globe is now 57% which corresponds to about 8 times growth over the period. The Western European & US market are expected to grow slightly less rapid, whereas Eastern Europe and Middle East/Africa are expected to catch up. Is our hunger for more mobile data now close to being satisfied ? Hardly – these numbers are about wide-area mobile networks and do not include WiFi that is growing even more rapidly. In the US 66% of the mobile traffic is currently carried by WiFi (44% worldwide). 
Another interesting Cisco forecast is the sharp rise for Low-power wide-area systems for IoT-applications (e.g. Weightless or Sigfox networks) at the end of the period. Not that much of the total aggregate traffic, but a staggering 29 % of the number of connected devices. Will the 4G/LTE operators take this lying down ?
Read more in this Gigaom post
