Mobile devices set to outnumber humans by year's end

It appears the ancient Mayan prophecy of an end times to come in 2012 might actually carry a bit of truth. That is if it referred to an end to unequal access to mobile devices. As a testament to the undeniable global usefulness of mobile devices, a new report said that this year will see mobile devices outnumbering human population and that a quarter of mobile users will own two or more of them.

Released annually, the Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2011–2016 presents the state of mobile networks around the world. For the current edition, it found that data consumption grew 2.3 times last year. A key factor in this is increased mobile network connection speed that grew 66% with average downstream rising to 315 kbps.

Cisco also said that by 2016, over half of the world's mobile traffic will come from Asia Pacific and Western Europe regions. However, the Middle East and Africa will experience the highest CAGR at 104% and grow 36 times over.

"Asia Pacific (a region that now includes Japan) will have the second highest CAGR of 84 percent, increasing 21-fold over the forecast period. The emerging market regions of Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America will have CAGRs of 83% and 79% respectively, and combined with Middle East and Africa will represent an increasing share of total mobile data traffic, up from 15% at the end of 2011 to 19 percent by 2016," it continued.

From a platform comparison, the report also said that although Apple iOS devices had higher data consumption than other operating systems, Google's Android has caught up to end 2011 with a 29% lead over Apple.

Find out more about Cisco's report by going to www.cisco.com or downloading the whitepaper here.