Cisco Predicts A Zettabyte Internet In 2015

Cisco has predicted that annual global IP traffic will reach the zettabyte level around 2015 in its annual report, the Visual Networking Index (VNI). The study looks at trends in Internet traffic from 2010 to 2015.

In 2010, global traffic stood at 236 exabytes, or 236 million terabytes but, with an increased range of devices and continued growth in the number of users, this will almost quadruple in five years to 966 exabytes, just short of a zettabyte (a billion terabytes).

“The explosive growth in Internet data traffic, especially video, creates an opportunity in the years ahead for optimising and monetising visual, virtual and mobile Internet experiences,” commented Suraj Shetty, vice president of worldwide service provider marketing at Cisco.

Two Devices For Every Person

The number of devices will rocket to 15 billion, the report predicts, outpacing the world’s population by two to one as adoption increases and machine-to-machine connections proliferate.

“In the past we’ve kept the mobile and fixed forecasts somewhat separate…” said Arielle Sumits, senior analyst with Cisco’s Worldwide Service Provider Marketing, “but it’s really become more important than ever to have an integrated, inclusive forecast – and that is what we did this year because you have broadcast-content that may at one time have been restricted to a broadcast network and a broadcast device. Now it can show up on the Internet network on any number of devices.”

Other factors fuelling this growth will be an expected four-fold increase in Internet delivery speeds, from 7Mbps in 2010 to 28Mbps in 2015. This, and the growth in online services, will help boost the number of Internet users to three billion, more than 40 percent of the world’s projected population, Cisco claims.

The report maps out several milestones for the next five years. Just as, in 2003, consumer Internet traffic surpassed business traffic for the first time, 2010 saw Internet video overtaking peer-to-peer networking as the largest volume of video traffic over the Internet. By extrapolation, Cisco claims that 2012 will be the year that video accounts for 50 percent of the consumer Internet traffic and a million households will generate over a terabyte of traffic each month.

At the end of 2014, a fifth of the video being consumed will be viewed on non-PC devices, setting the stage for Internet traffic volume routed to wireless devices to exceed wired device-volumes in 2015. Large video streams will become more prevalent with a million video minutes, the equivalent of 674 days, traversing the Internet every second.