Ambitious Outlook For Mobile Internet Traffic


During the dot-com boom, research firms were beside themselves to project gargantuan growth for the Internet and Internet traffic. Many of these forecasts proved to be wildly overstated.

Could this be happening again?

A New York research outfit weighed in with an astonishing prediction Tuesday which at first glance seems like data deja vu. Five years from now, according to ABI Research, mobile data traffic to cellular handsets, such as the iPhone, and to computers with cellular modems will exceed all the Internet traffic (wired and mobile) in 2008.

Computers with cellular modems will lead the growth. Computers with built-in cellular modems (both 3G and 4G) will account for 50 percent of mobile traffic in 2014, the firm said.

In that year, mobile traffic volume will total 1.6 Exabytes, with a quarter coming from video and audio streaming. Peer-to-peer file sharing will account for just 1 percent of traffic.

ABI should be commended for putting a stake in the ground. Let’s see how the prediction holds up mid way through the next decade.