Cisco is buying Wi-Fi analytics company ThinkSmart Technologies for an unspecified amount.
By analyzing Wi-Fi data, Cicso says retailers should get a better scoop on how quickly consumers move in stores, when they're the most crowded, and where consumers go when they shop. (Of course, this assumes that most shoppers are carrying smartphones with them, which is likely the case.)
But you might be surprised by the second-leading source of the expected surge in traffic. It won't come from people, but from machine-to-machine communications, or "M2M." Think of sensors in cars and in appliances, surveillance cameras, smart electric meters, and devices still to come, monitoring the world and reporting to each other and to centralized computers what they're detecting. The chart below, reprinted from the Cisco report, shows just how extreme the jump in machine-to-machine communications could be. It is expected to grow, on average, 86 percent a year, and by 2016 it is expected to reach 508 petabytes a month, or half a billion gigabytes.
