Data traffic over mobile networks in South Africa will increase by nearly eight-fold in the next five years and grow twice as quickly as fixed Internet traffic.

That’s one of the key predictions in networking vendor Cisco’s “Visual Networking Index Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2013-2018”. The research uses independent analyst forecasts, real-world mobile data usage studies and other data.

From 2013 to 2018, Cisco expects mobile traffic growth will be double that of fixed traffic in South Africa.

It forecasts that there will be 40m mobile users by 2018, up from 38m in 2013. Fully 95% of those users will access the Internet by the end of the forecast period.

Worldwide, there will be 4,9bn mobile users, up from 4,1bn in 2013, Cisco predicts.

Mobile data traffic in South Africa will have a compound annual growth of 53% in the next five years and will reach an annual overall consumption rate of two exabytes (just over 2bn gigabytes) by 2018.

Three in five mobile connections in South Africa will be “smart” connections by 2018, up from 20% in 2013. The average mobile connection speed will double by 2018, reaching 1,5Mbit/s from 704kbit/s in 2013. And by 2018, 4G networks will support 13,8% of all South African mobile connections, up from 1,1% in 2013.

“The projected increase in mobile traffic is due partly to continued strong growth in the number of mobile Internet connections, such as personal devices and machine-to-machine connections, which will reach 98m by 2018, or approximately 1,8 per capita for the country,” Cisco says.

Within five years, video will make up 78% of South Africa’s mobile data traffic, compared to an already high 50% at the end of last year. Globally, video will represent 69% of mobile data traffic in 2018, up from 53% in 2013.

Other key predictions for South Africa include:

In 2018, machine-to-machine, or M2M, modules will represent more than 17% of device connections and 2% of total traffic. (M2M refers to applications that allow wireless and wired systems to communicate with similar devices to support GPS navigation systems, asset tracking, utility meters, security and surveillance video.)
4G networks will account for 39% of total mobile data traffic by 2018, compared to 9% at the end of 2013.
By 2018, 33% of mobile traffic will be offloaded onto Wi-Fi networks or small-cell networks, up from 20% in 2013. — (c) 2014 NewsCentral Media