Worldwide mobile data traffic to rocket—Cisco

SAN FRANCISCO—The amount of data sent to or from mobile gadgets around the world annually will rocket to hit the equivalent of 33 billion full-length DVD films by the year 2016, computer networking titan Cisco forecast on Tuesday.

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Worldwide mobile data traffic will increase 18-fold in the coming five years to an annual rate of 130 exabytes – the equivalent of 4.3 quadrillion digital songs or about 813 quadrillion text messages.

The surge in wireless data traffic will be due, in part, to an explosion in the number of “connected devices,” according to Cisco.

The California-based firm forecast that the number of gadgets linked wirelessly to the Internet would exceed the number of people on Earth in the year 2016.

Another factor will be the popularity of streaming music and videos to increasingly sophisticated mobile devices.

Africa and the Middle East were expected to have the fastest regional growth rates for mobile data traffic, followed by the Asia-Pacific and then Central and Eastern Europe.