CISCO predicts mobile devices to outnumber humans by end of year

CISCO has claimed the number of smartphones, tablets and laptops will exceed number of humans in 2013.

Sydney: Networking giants CISCO has claimed the number of smartphones, tablets and laptops will exceed number of humans in 2013 CISCO’s research said the growth in the use of smartphones and tablets would exceed seven billion, which is the world''s current population, in use, with huge growth in use in Asia, the Pacific and Africa, the Sydney Morning Herald reports.

A growing category will be internet-connected monitors for smart metering, video surveillance, maintenance, building automation, healthcare and consumer electronics, which is a class of device known as machine-to-machine (M2M) systems that communicate directly to other computers over the internet without the mediation of humans, the paper added.

The speedy escalation in connected devices will put the existing internet infrastructure under greater than ever strain, and would force internet providers to shift customers and networks over to the next-generation IPv6 system, which expands the number of devices that can connect directly to the internet from around 4.3 billion (using the existing IPv4 system) to a massive figure that is large enough to give every single person their own private IPv4-based internet.

Trefor Davies, who is a driving force behind the adoption of IPv6 in the UK, said despite the near-exhaustion of the IPv4 address space in February 2012 progress towards wider use of IPv6 has been slow.

Davies added in the US, the government has mandated it in some areas, such as the US Navy, but the UK government seems to be concerned about costs. Davies further suggested the two protocols are incompatible, and updating systems used by internet service providers to offer a fully IPv6-capable system has put many off.

By 2017, Cisco said, the average smartphone will generate 2.7GB of data traffic a month, which is almost a tenfold growth from today, and one that will put enormous demands on the internet backbone, the paper said.