Cisco's latest data growth prognostications suggest mobile data data traffic will increase 18-fold over the next five years. The result will be the global transfer of 10.8 exabytes per month -- or an annual run rate of 130 exabytes -- by 2016. Interestingly noted in the latest data but not highlighted was the fact that tiered pricing seems to be driving more data usage, not less. The data shows that traffic on tiered planes increased 169% in the past 21 months versus 83% for unlimited data plans.

That's in contrast to previous studies we've seen that have shown users on Sprint unlimited data plans consume more data than their capped and metered alternatives. Cisco claims that this shift is due to consumers being "educated" about their data consumption by carriers and that they want to get more consumption for their money:That runs in contrast with the narrative that carriers imposed such models solely for congestion reasons. The obvious reality is carriers imposed such limits to cash in on growth and offset the inevitable death of the SMS and voice minute. Tiered pricing is usually designed to push users up the pricing scale by offering an unreasonably low plan (usually 200-300MB) that forces them to pay more for a plan where they don't usually use all the available data (usually 2-3 GB). According to Cisco, 60 percent of mobile users, or 3 billion people, will use more than one 1GB of mobile data traffic per month in 2016.