Updated 2015 VNI Mobile Forecast Reveals Potential “Wildcards” for Mobile Devices, Networks and Services
This week, Cisco released its annual Visual Networking Index (VNI) Global Mobile Data Forecast, 2014 – 2019. Among the traditional top-line growth projections that indicate a healthy mobile industry (e.g., more than 5.2 billion global mobile users by 2019 and 10-fold mobile traffic growth over the next five years), there were several interesting trends that could have significant implications for mobile networking in the near future.
Mobile Devices: Laptops make a comeback and phablets start to emerge
While there is an overall growth in the number of mobile devices and connections, there is also a visible shift in the device mix. This year forecast shows a slight slowdown in the growth of tablets as a new device sub-category, phablets (included in our smartphone category), were began to show global adoption. Tablet growth was also affected by the introduction of lightweight laptops, which are quite similar to tablets in form factor but have more enhanced capabilities. Today, tablets are primarily being used as content consumption devices – ideally suited for video viewing in particular. Laptops are still serving as the dominant content creation device, particularly for business users (e.g., presentation, spreadsheet, and document development). While the absolute numbers or volume for smartphones (4.6 billion by 2019), tablets (nearly 300 million by 2019) and laptops (nearly 250 million by 2019) are growing, they are all losing their percentage share of total mobile devices and connections to the fastest growing mobile connection type – M2M (3.2 billion by 2019).
Mobile Networks: Low Power, Wide-Area (LPWA) networks may be optimal for campus-wide IoE applications
This year’s forecast includes M2M nodes connected via Low-Power, Wide-Area (LPWA) networks. These networks are Continue reading “Three Mobile Trends to Watch”
