Released Tuesday, Cisco Systems Inc.’s Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast takes a look back at 2014 and offers a glimpse at what it predicts mobile data traffic will look like by 2019. Simply put, the numbers are staggering. Networking equipment provider Cisco predicts a ten-fold growth in mobile data traffic by 2019. In numbers, that translates to 24.3 exabytes per month. One Exabyte is a million gigabytes. Over a period of a year, 2019 in this case, that would total 292 exabytes, or 65 trillion Instagram photos or six trillion YouTube clips, as Cisco infers. The total mobile data traffic for 2014 was 30 exabytes.

The forecast identifies a number of drivers for this unprecedented growth:

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Wearables and other machine-to-machine (M2M) applications

According to Cisco’s forecast numbers, the wearables market will grow five-fold in the next five years from 109 million devices in 2014 to 578 million devices by 2019. This will result in an 18-fold increase in mobile data traffic.

According to Cisco, high-end wearables like a GoPro action video camera can easily generate 5MB of mobile data traffic per minute when live streaming footage. Mobile video is projected to make up 72 percent of global mobile data traffic by 2019, up from 55 percent in 2014.

Cisco also points to other M2M applications that will contribute to the vertical’s growth, such as connected utility meters, surveillance video systems and GPS systems. A total of 3.2 billion connections will come from M2M applications.

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Smartphones, tablets and laptops

Cisco predicts that by 2019, 69 percent of the world population will use mobile devices. That is 5.2 billion people, up from 4.3 billion in 2014, using 4.6 billion smartphones and 3.1 billion feature phones.

Devices such as smartphones, tablets and laptops will account for 8.3 billion connections.

How will mobile carriers cope with this increase in traffic?

As it stands, mobile carriers do not depend on their own cellular networks to cope with data traffic. In 2014, 46 percent of mobile data traffic was offloaded to Wi-Fi and small-cell networks. By 2019, this number will increase to 54 percent, Cisco said.

Cisco also forecasts that end-users will enjoy faster mobile speeds by 2019, an average of 4Mbps vs. 1.7Mbps in 2014.

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