Cisco: Global IP traffic to increase more than fourfold by 2014
June 3, 2010
The latest annual Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) Forecast, 2009-2014 projects that global Internet traffic will increase more than fourfold to 767 exabytes, or more than 3/4 of a Zettabyte, by 2014. This amount is 100 exabytes higher than the projected level in 2013, or an increase the equivalent of 10 times all the traffic traversing Internet Protocol networks in 2008.
The growth in traffic will continue to be dominated by video, exceeding 91 per cent of global consumer IP traffic by 2014. Improvements in network bandwidth capacity and Internet speeds, along with the increasing popularity of HDTV and 3DTV are key factors expecting to quadruple IP traffic from 2009 to 2014, says Cisco.
Other significant findings:
– By 2014, the sum of all forms of video (TV, VoD, Internet video, and peer-to-peer) will continue to exceed 91 per cent of global consumer traffic.
– Global Internet video traffic will surpass global peer-to-peer traffic by the end of 2010. For the first time in the last 10 years, peer-to-peer traffic will not be the largest Internet traffic type.
– The global online video community will include more than 1 billion users by the end of 2010.
– By 2014, it would take more than two years to watch the amount of video that will cross global IP networks every second; to watch all the video crossing the network that year would take 72 million years.
– Globally, advanced video traffic, including three-dimensional (3-D) and high-definition TV (HDTV), is projected to increase 13 times between 2009 and 2014.
– By 2014, 3-D is expected to account for 4 per cent of total Internet video traffic.
– By 2014, 3-D and HD video is forecast to comprise 42 per cent of total consumer Internet video traffic.
According to Pankaj Patel, senior vice president and general manager, Service Provider Group, Cisco, service providers are faced with evolving bandwidth and scalability requirements as residential, business and mobile consumers continue to demonstrate a healthy appetite for advanced video services across a variety of networks and devices. He suggested that IP networks must be intelligent and flexible enough to support this tremendous variety of traffic growth, and added that the VNI Forecast offered a global snapshot of video’s significance in our daily lives and signalled the need for further network preparations to support the quadrupling of the Internet and the more than 1 billion online video users by 2014.