TechCrunch:
By 2013, annual global IP traffic will reach two-thirds of a zettabyte, according to a new forecast of IP traffic
issued by Cisco today. What is a zettabyte? It is a trillion gigabytes,
dummy. (I had to look that up too). And that number represents more
than a fivefold increase in IP traffic from today. (See the forecast in
the tables below).
What is driving this growth is video. Cisco forecasts that 90
percent of consumer IP traffic (which makes up the majority of total IP
traffic) will be video in 2013. Cisco also predicts that mobile data
traffic will also be overtaken by video, reaching 64 percent of total mobile IP traffic
by 2013. Part of this might be wishful thinking on Cisco’s part, which
needs broadband usage growth to continue apace in order to sell its
networking gear. But part of it is also the fact that these numbers are
based on the percentage of bits traveling over those broadband pipes,
and it doesn’t take a lot of fat video files to fill those up.
Cisco is a big believer in the growth of mobile video, expecting it to grow from 33 petabytes a month in 2008 to 2,184 petabytes (or 2 exabytes) a month in 2013, which represents a 131 percent compound annual growth rate. (No wonder it bought the maker of the Flip video camera). As impressive as those numbers sound, at that point, mobile data will only make up 4 percent of total IP traffic. (Good thing Apple finally decided to get with the program and add video to its upcoming iPhone 3GS). In the chart below, you can see how big a role Cisco expects video to play in mobile data traffic. Video is the green part of the bar graphs. Standalone data (dark blue) is also expected to grow quickly. [Read more]
posted by: gqpartners
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