Video makes Cisco's crystal ball sparkle

Cisco predicts that global IP traffic will reach over half a trillion gigbytes -- or 250 billion DVDs -- in the next four years. Reaching half a zettabyte by 2012 represents a sixfold increase from 2007, and is driven by video and social networking, Cisco claims. Cisco's data comes from its own Visual Networking Index, which is intended to pinpoint trends on consumer and business IP networking driven by increasing use of video and Web 2.0 social networking and collaboration applications.

And perhaps not by coincidence, the VNI is intended to build the case for Cisco product -- video, Web 2.0, collaboration and infrastructure.

Cisco's VNI indicates that IP traffic will increase at a "combined" annual growth rate (CAGR) of 46% from 2007 to 2012, or nearly doubling every two years. This will result in an annual bandwidth demand on the world's IP networks of approximately 522 exabytes -- or 522 billion gigabytes -- or more than half a zettabyte, Cisco says.

In 2012, Internet video traffic alone will be 400 times the traffic carried by the U.S. Internet backbone in 2000, Cisco says. Internet video climbed 10% in one year, to 22% of global consumer Internet traffic in 2007.

Video on demand, IPTV, peer-to-peer video, and Internet video are forecast to account for nearly 90% of all consumer IP traffic in 2012, Cisco says. Global business IP traffic is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 35% from 2007 to 2012.

Increased broadband penetration in the small-business segment and the increased adoption of video communications in the enterprise are major drivers for business IP traffic growth, Cisco says.

Business IP traffic will grow fastest in the developing markets and Asia-Pacific. In volume, North America will continue to have the most business IP traffic through 2012, followed by Asia-Pacific and Western Europe, the VNI shows.

The VNI also finds that global IP traffic will reach 44 exabytes per month in 2012, compared to less than seven per month in 2007. By comparison, global IP traffic in all of 2002 was five exabytes, which means that the volume of IP traffic for the full year of 2012 will be over 100 times as large.

Monthly global IP traffic in December 2012 will be 11 exabytes higher than in December 2011, a single-year increase that will exceed the amount by which traffic has increased in the eight years since 2000, Cisco's VNI predicts. The study also finds that mobile data traffic will roughly double each year from 2008 through 2012.

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