Mobile data traffic in South Africa will grow nine-fold between 2017 and 2022, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 54%, to reach 1.2 exabytes per month at the end of the forecast period. That’s up from 133 petabytes in 2017.

Cisco’s latest Visual Networking Index (VNI) Global Mobile Traffic Forecast, 2017-2022, shows that the gigabyte equivalent of all movies ever made will cross South Africa’s mobile networks every five hours by 2022.

Mobile data traffic will grow at a 54.3% on a CAGR basis, or 2.2 times faster than fixed Internet traffic growth of 24.2% from 2017 to 2022.

Mobile data traffic will account for 49% of South Africa’s total Internet traffic by 2022, up from 24% in 2017.

According to the Cisco report, mobile traffic per mobile-connected end-user device will reach 12GB/month by 2022, up from 1.5GB in 2017.

Other key South Africa-specific findings of the research include:

Mobile traffic per user will reach 24.5GB/month by 2022, up from 3GB in 2017;
Mobile traffic per capita will reach 19.3GB/month by 2022, up from 2.3GB in 2017; and
There will be 47 million (78% of the population) mobile users by 2022, up from 44 million in 2017.

The report predicts that global mobile data will nearly reach the zettabyte (one trillion gigabytes) milestone by 2022, while mobile traffic will represent 20% of global Internet traffic. Smartphones will exceed 90% share of total mobile data traffic.