Mobile subscribers in North America and the Asia-Pacific region will be the drivers of a 13-fold growth rate in global mobile data traffic from 2012 - 2017, according to a new report from Cisco Systems. The report, Cisco's sixth such Visual Networking Index Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast, estimates that over the next five years mobile data traffic will reach 11.2 exabytes--a billion gigabytes--per month. According to the forecast, in 2017 the average mobile subscriber worldwide will use 2 GB of data per month, up from around 200 MB in 2012. While data traffic is expected to grow over the forecast period in both Western and Central and Eastern Europe, much of the traffic growth over the next five years will come from subscribers in the Asia-Pacific region and North America. for example, Cisco forecasts that the number of mobile users will climb by a combined 41 million in all of Europe from 2012 to 2017, while in the Asia-Pacific region the jump will be 603 million mobile users. Article
