Cisco just released its Visual Networking Index forecasting the global mobile data traffic over next five years. Here are some quick takes..

Exaponential Growth. Mobile data traffic worldwide will grow 39X in 5 years. By 2014 Cisco estimates the monthly data on mobile will average 3.6EB or exabytes. If you are going wow, what’s an exabyte – well it’s basically a million terabytes or a billion gigabytes. What’s more compelling is the dominance of video within this exponential growth (or should I say exaponential growth). 66% of all Mobile data traffic is going to be Video by 2014. Video dominance starts as early as next year, see below.

Consumers dominate mobile data traffic thanks in part to the video streaming smart phones. Mobile data traffic driven by consumers will go from 67% of total in 2009 to 73% of total in 2014; business users from 33% to 27% respective years. Besides the smart phones, major traffic hogs (mobile devices) will be mobile phone projectors (a.k.a. Picoprojectors) and laptops. This begs the question, won’t these mobile devices offload some of the traffic to Wi-Fi?

Wi-Fi offload of mobile data traffic over next five years seems to be net-zero at best, globally speaking. Per Cisco, while a significant amount of traffic will migrate from mobile to fixed networks, there will be much greater migration the other way around. Essentially, in many emerging countries such as India and Mexico the offload will decline during 2009-2014 while in developed nations the offload will rise. Remember only the dual-mode enabled mobile devices can offload from say 3G to Wi-Fi.

What this means to you? With so much demand you will likely get more data from a plan for your smart phone that costs you much less. The growth might also mean higher quality videos that load faster on your iPhone or Droid, for example.