24 per cent of all traffic generated from smartphones, Tablets and other devices will be onloaded to the cellular network by 2016, according the Data Offload & Onload report from Juniper Research. The annual data traffic onloaded from these devices onto the mobile network will reach over 7,500 petabytes by 2016. Thats equivalent to 7.6m terabytes, or 7.8bn gigabytes – or, to put it another way, 3 trillion music downloads.

“Consumers are also tethering their mobile devices with laptops and netbooks for data connectivity, using unlimited-bundled data plans providing them with the advantage of requiring no modem, new configurations or any other gadgets,” says report author Nitin Bhas. “With the introduction of 4G speeds, users are expected to increasingly take advantage of tethering in the future.”

That volume of data will obviously put an enormous strain on operators, especially in North America and Western Europe, which will together account for over 76 per cent of the offloaded data, which the accompanying Avoiding the Jam whitepaper is intended to help companies with.

The full report can be downloaded here.