Businesses have some big decision to make this year

According to a report on US mobile operator network traffic, smartphones and connected computing devices will be the primary drivers of data traffic over the next five years. By 2014, says ABI Research, these device categories will generate more than 87 percent of total mobile network data traffic for US operators.

Cisco has been saying for years that mobile video data traffic content is exploding, and it now expects the amount of video traffic in 2014 to be 66% of all mobile data traffic by 2014. That prediction came in a new forecast by the networking company.

Vodafone reported Thursday that revenue from data services exceeded £1 billion (US$1.58 billion) for the first time during the last three months of 2010, but that only partially helped offset lower voice revenue.

Mobile data traffic is likely to more than double every year for the next five years, driven by video services, and the heaviest users are likely to be Europeans, according to Cisco Systems, which has just published an update to its Visual Networking Index data traffic forecast.