Half a billion wearables... and guess whose kit has to support all that data, asks Cisco

"As a result, total mobile data traffic will reach 292 exabytes (292 x 1018 bytes) per year by 2019, up from 30 exabytes in 2014, according to the latest Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast for 2014 to 2019."

Not if the cell cos can help it. The data pricing here in the US is absurd (like $30 for 2GB), price per GB has actually been increasing while cost to carry those GBs has decreased. Very few unlimited plans, and cash overages instead of "throttle caps" (except T-Mobile!). I'm on grandfathered unlimited, but I know for damn sure I would not let my data price balloon from, say, $30 a month to $300 a month! (as would happen with the 10x the useage Cisco suggests), and I doubt very many other people would either.

Also, I would never let my phone switch from wifi *back* to cellular just to let some cellco recoup fees! After all, the phone is going to be doing more than one thing at a time, I don't want that "free" music stream to be running but the GMail updates and whatever using up my data while I told the phone to stay on wifi.

data growth...particularly wearables

Unless those wearable are going to rapidly evolve into self-contained units with their own 3/4/5G sim then I don't really see wearables having all that much impact on mobile data at all. Most of their data throughput is to the host device. Mobile video streaming is a waste of time most of the time. Not enough bandwidth and just how often are you going to watch HD films on the move? Dunno about others reading here, but when I'm out and about,I don't have time to spend a half hour watching a TV show or a couple of hours to watch a film.

For that matter, many mobile phone/tablet apps use over the air data for no good reason other than tracking and marketing and because they have convinced their punters that "cloud" == better. The phone/table is often powerful enough to do it's own processing without it all being sent off to some cloudy infrastructure. For example, why does a Bluetooth connected fitness band need to send data, via the attached phone, to a server somewhere in the world just so the phone you have with you can then get the data back and show you a graph?

No one ever seems to consider the interests of the user or the good of the network. It all seems to be greed driven as in "more data == more money", whether that be telcos charging for data throughput or app writers collecting it.

Video saturation?

There must surely come a point when everyone who wants to watch web videos is using their only two eyes already and watching at retinal resolution. You can't just extrapolate current trends indefinitely.

My guess is that the developed world is closer to that point than some pundits recognise. If you spend too much time watching cat videos, you don't earn enough to pay the mobile data bills.

I don't think M2M would need a lot of bandwith

The M2M machine I've seen which needed the most bandwidth was a fridge which posts pictures of its insides every time you close the door. That's roughly 2 Megabytes a day. And that device will be connected via Wifi.

The point is that in the future carriers will become less and less important. You will just want to have IP from your cellular company. And should you want telephony, you just choose any of the VoIP companies out there.

Wearables doesn't need much data

The primary comms technologies for wearables are ANT and Bluetooth Smart/LE.

Both these are designed around the idea of very low amounts of data sent in short bursts. This is done to save power. These devices spend almost all of the time sleeping. They wake up, send data and go back to sleep all within a few milliseconds.

That does not generate exabytes of data and never can. The constraint is in the batteries and the comms these devices use.

Of course all this data implies someone is later downloading reports and pretty graphs etc. But as we really can only do one or two things at a time, that does not increase data. All the time we spend looking at our heart rate charts is time we are not watching kitty videos.