There's just a mind-boggling article on PC World today on the expected explosion of wireless traffic over the next four years.
The article estimates that by 2016, that wireless traffic will average approximately 10.8 exabytes per month. The scary thing is that I didn't know what an exabyte is so I read further in the article and one exabyte is one billion gigabytes. This is per month, not per year. This is an 18 fold increase over the average monthly bandwidth now.
It then goes on to estimate that in a year that the total wireless network traffic will be approximately 130 billion gigabytes. To give this extreme number some context, the average DVD holds about 4.7 gigabytes of data, so this would be the equivalent of about 28 billion DVDs worth of data floating through the air (and I'd guess through our collective bodies too!.
Another interesting tidbit, the article estimates that wireless connections will exceed wired connections by 2015. I would not be surprised at all if it's sooner. I did a quick calculation in my own home and I have the following devices connected via WiFi: one notebook, one Playstation 3, 3 cell phones, one tablet PC, two Nintendo DS gaming systems and one printer. That's 9 devices. It's no wonder that when there's a power failure we barely know what to do with ourselves!
To close off of this article with one last fact, which I think more than anything else demonstrates the proliferation of technology in our lives, the spellchecker in this article flagged exabyte as a spelling mistake. Apparently, even our electronic dictionaries can keep pace!
http://www.pcworld.com/article/249922/mobile_explosion_wireless_traffic_could_reach_108_exabytes_a_month_by_2016.html#tk.rss_news
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