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Mobile broadband traffic nearly tripled in 2010

According to Cisco's Visual Networking Index concerning mobile data across the globe, there was 2.6 times more traffic in 2010 over 2009. All of this data came out to be roughly 237 petabytes per month, which, according to Cisco, is the equivalent storage space of 59,250,000 DVDs in the span of one month. To put it into greater perspective, Cisco says that 400 Terabytes is all it would take to maintain a digital library of every book ever written in any language. 237 petabytes would hold over 400 copies of said library. 

The report went on to show that mobile broadband speeds have doubled since 2009. In 2010, the average speed was 215 kbps compared to 101 kbps in 2009. Connections on Smartphones were even faster. The average smartphone speed was 1040 kbps in 2010, which is up from 2009 when the average speed was just 625 kbps. Among smartphone users, Cisco found that 10% accounted for 60% of all smartphone traffic. Regular phones still make up the majority of the market, but Cisco found they only use on average about 3.3MB per month compared to the average smartphone which uses about 79MB per month.

Cisco estimates that by 2015, mobile traffic will reach 6.3 exabytes per month. They say that 5 exabytes would be all that is needed to store every word ever spoken. They think that each smartphone will consume 1.3GB of data each month and connection speeds will average 2.2 Mbps which should make it easier to consume more data. 

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