Cisco: two connected devices for every person by 2015

Cisco has predicted that by 2015 there will be twice as many connected devices as the world’s population – a total of 15 billion.

Cisco’s fifth annual Visual Networking Index Forecast also predicts that internet traffic will quadruple between now and 2015, reaching 966 exabytes, which equates to nearly a trillion gigabytes. That growth will be driven partly by the proliferation of connected devices including smartphones and tablets, and also due to the growing popularity of online video. Cisco said over one million minutes, or 674 days, worth of video will traverse the internet every second by 2015. That would be a 14-fold increase on 2010’s figures.

Internet traffic will also increase due to faster broadband speeds, which are set to average 28Mbps by 2015, four times faster than the 7Mbps average in 2010. Cisco said the average speed had doubled to 7Mbps in the past year.