Mobile Data Use and M2M Communication Exploding

Yesterday Cisco released an annual analysis of how much Internet usage is growing on mobile devices, and the report produced some staggering numbers.

Among other items, Cisco reports mobile data traffic will reach the following milestones within the next five years.

• Monthly global mobile data traffic will surpass 10 exabytes (10¹⁸⁾ in 2016.
• Over 100 million smartphone users will belong to the "gigabyte club" (over 1 GB per month) by 2012.
• The number of mobile-connected devices will exceed the world's population in 2012.
• The average mobile connection speed will surpass 1 Mbps in 2014.
• Due to increased usage on smartphones, handsets will exceed 50 percent of mobile data traffic in 2014.
• Monthly global mobile data traffic will surpass 10 exabytes in 2016.
• Monthly mobile tablet traffic will surpass 1 exabyte per month in 2016.
• Tablets will exceed 10 percent of global mobile data traffic in 2016.
• China will exceed 10 percent of global mobile data traffic in 2016.

A new source of the expected surge in traffic is interesting. It won't come from people, but from machine-to-machine communications, or "M2M." Think of sensors in cars and in appliances, surveillance cameras, smart electric meters, cloud robotics, and devices still to come, monitoring the world and reporting to each other and to centralized computers what they're detecting. The chart below, reprinted from the Cisco report, shows just how extreme the jump in machine-to-machine communications could be. It is expected to grow, on average, 86 percent a year, and by 2016 it is expected to reach 508 petabytes a month, or half a billion gigabytes.

Cisco reports that cellular communication between objects, machines, or sensors has led to the growth of M2M connections. These connections are in the form of smart metering, business and consumer surveillance, inventory management, fleet management, and healthcare modules, all of which are designed for operational excellence. 

M2M technologies are being used across a broad spectrum of industries. As real-time information monitoring is helping companies to deploy new video-based security systems and hospitals and helping healthcare professionals to remotely monitor the progress of their patients, bandwidth-intensive M2M connections become more prevalent. Traditional appliances and devices, such as home appliances, vehicles, energy meters, and vending machines-which traditionally have not been connected directly to cellular networks-are now entering the network. 

High-bandwidth scenarios for M2M are becoming real in many categories, including the following.

• Business and consumer security and surveillance: Video streams such as commercial security cameras, nannycams, and petcams, accessed through mobile-enabled residential or commercial gateways, fall into this category.
• Health care: In the medical, well-being, and sports and fitness industries, devices and services used by medical personnel are being connected to reduce errors.
• Inventory and fleet management: Wi-Fi is being considered as an adjunct to cellular-based fleet management connectivity, to allow a vehicle to use cellular technology in the field, and support lower-cost, higher-speed Wi-Fi to download and upload data while in fleet headquarters and loading areas.
• Telematics: Trip assistance, navigation, and vehicle management are gaining greater consumer adoption, along with broadband-to-the-car offerings that use a cellular connection to the vehicle and then distribute the connection to notebook PCs and other devices within the vehicle through Wi-Fi.

The report also mentions augmented reality and other future technologies as being factors that will boost the overall data use over the coming years.

Cisco