The air is almost as thick with data as it once was with the smoke of the Industrial Revolution, with increasingly dense billows of bits traveling between the world's billions of mobile devices.
In 2010 alone, the amount of mobile data sent was 2.6 times what it was in 2009. And by 2015, people will send 26 times more mobile data than they do now, according to Cisco's annual Global Mobile Traffic Forecast.
That will mean 6.3 exabytes per month, said Suraj Shetty, Cisco's vice president of worldwide service provider marketing. "That's the equivalent of every man, woman and child on Earth sending 1,000 text messages every second," he said.
Yipes, better upgrade my plan!
Cisco says two-thirds of that data traffic will come from mobile video, as more people begin making video calls, sending each other clips they've recorded, and watching longer-form television and movies on their cellphones and tablets.
For a little perspective: Mobile traffic in 2010 was three times as large as all the world's combined Internet traffic in 2000. In short, mobile broadband is getting big -- everywhere.
"There are regions in the world where they have mobile Internet connectivity but are not on the electrical grid," said Doug Webster, Cisco's senior director of service provider marketing. "The Internet is breaking the electrical barrier."
The growth of mobile networks will come with an increase in wireless speeds too. The global average is about 200 kilobits per second now, but as more so-called 4G networks are erected around the world, the average will increase by a factor of 10, to about 2.2 megabits per second. That's on the low end of what home broadband brings today -- pretty astonishing, considering it includes mobile networks in all of the world's developing countries.
But not all of the data explosion is going to come from the rise in smart phones and tablets. In 2015, Cisco predicts, most of the mobile traffic will still come from laptops and netbooks (56%), while smart phones will account for about 27%, and tablets only about 3.5% of the traffic growth.
Cisco makes its predictions by pooling various sources, including data compiled by research firms, polling its own infrastructure of Internet servers, and sampling the data habits of more than 390,000 users who run Cisco's Global Internet Speed Test smart-phone application.
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Egypt may have turned off the Internet one phone call at a time
-- David Sarno
Photo: A giant bubble of interstellar gamma rays discovered by NASA's Fermi telescope. Credit: NASA Goddard Photo and Video/Flickr
Soon after, so did cellphones across Egypt, and then the Internet, as authorities cut communication in a last-ditch effort to halt the protests gripping the country.
The only trace the caller left was in cyberspace, where he had delivered a haunting message via Twitter: “Pray for #Egypt.”
Three days later in Washington, D.C., Nadine Wahab, an Egyptian émigré and media-relations professional, sat staring at her computer, hoping rumors of the caller’s disappearance weren’t true.
Suddenly his screen name flashed to life. She stared at the message.
“Admin 1 is missing,” it said. “This is Admin 2.”
Admin 1 was the caller, the anonymous administrator of a Facebook page that had played a crucial role in inspiring the uprising in Cairo. He had left Wahab with a contingency plan. If he disappeared, Wahab should wait until Feb. 8, two weeks from the date of the first protest, before she revealed his identity and sounded the alarm. At all costs, she was to maintain the appearance of normalcy on the page.
The contingency plan had made no mention of an Admin 2, and Wahab worried that the message might be a trap.
For the next week, Wahab and her small cadre of online associates became immersed in what seemed like a shadowy cyberthriller. At its center was a bespectacled techie named Wael Ghonim, a 30-year-old father of two, and Google’s head of marketing in the Middle East.
“My purpose,” wrote Wael Ghonim, “is to increase the bond between the people and the group through my unknown personality. This way we create an army of volunteers.”
Khaled Desouki / Getty Images
Months of online correspondence between Ghonim and Wahab, parts of which were provided to Newsweek, as well as telephone and online conversations with the magazine, reveal a man who adopted a dead man’s identity to push for democracy, taking on a secret life that nearly consumed him.
Ghonim had received a master’s degree in marketing and finance from American University in Cairo and began working for Google in late 2008. In little more than a year, he was promoted to head of marketing for the Middle East and North Africa, a position based in Dubai, where he and his family moved into a house in one of the city’s affluent suburbs.
• Niall Ferguson Blasts Obama’s Egypt Debacle
• Christopher Dickey: Hosni Mubarak’s Final Tragedy
• Peter Beinart: America’s Proud Egypt MomentGhonim and Wahab met electronically last spring, after Ghonim volunteered to run the Facebook fan page of Mohamed ElBaradei, the Egyptian Nobel Prize winner who had emerged as a key opposition leader; Wahab offered to help with PR. Ghonim had a strong tech background, having already founded several successful Web ventures. But it was his marketing skills that would fuel his transformation into Egypt’s most important cyberactivist.
Under Ghonim, ElBaradei’s page, which promoted democratic reform, grew rapidly. He surveyed its fans for input, pushing ideas like crowdsourced video Q&As. “Voting is the right way to represent people in a democratic way,” he wrote Wahab in May. “We use it even inside Google internally. Even when our CEO is live, if someone posts a tough question and others vote, he must answer it.”
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