A new report from Cisco Systems expects Canadians to ‘consume mass quantities’ of mobile data in the next five years – specifically, 246.8 Petabytes per month by 2018. That’s a 762% increase from the current monthly rate of 28.6 Petabytes. For reference, it takes 1048576 Gigabytes to make 1 Petabyte, so that’s quite a few additional Snapchat photos.
One major reason for the jump is all the 4G smartphones that seem to be popular with the kids these days. Cisco estimates that 4G traffic will grow to represent 61% of total Canadian mobile traffic by 2018, compared to 25.8% today. The increase is significant as 4G devices average approximately twice as much mobile data traffic per month, at 2,226 MB/month vs. 1,067 MB/month.
Canada’s 4G growth is well ahead of the global average, which is expected to increase by a factor of 8 to 15% of all mobile connections by 2018. It will be interesting to see how Canadian carriers manage the upcoming data crunch, and if Industry Canada’s new tower regulations will play a role.
[via]Financial Post[/via]
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