Cisco: 15bn connected devices by 2015
June 1, 2011
The number of connected devices will reach over 15 billion – twice the world’s population – by 2015 predicts Cisco. It predicts the proliferation of tablets, mobile phones, connected appliances and other smart devices will drive this growth and consumer video will continue to dominate Internet traffic; that by 2015 one million minutes of video will be watched online every second.
The predictions come from Cisco’s fifth annual Visual Networking Index which also estimated that at the same time more than 40% of the world’s projected population will be online, a total of nearly three billion people. Cisco forecast that by 2015 internet traffic will reach 966 exabytes a year. An exabyte is equal to one quintillion bytes. In 2004, global monthly internet traffic passed one exabyte for the first time.
“What you are seeing is this massive growth in devices, the way devices are being used and are connected to the Internet and what users expect them to do,” said Suraj Shetty, Cisco vice president for global marketing. We are running out of IPv4 addresses and the adoption of IPv6 is going to be front and centre of everything for the next several years. The most important question we face is how to manage all this traffic intelligently,” Shetty added.
On 8 June, on what has been dubbed World IPv6 Day, Cisco will be joined by telecom giant Verizon, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, TimeWarner, Comcast and many others in testing IPv6.