Video will drive a 21% compound annual growth rate in business IP traffic across WANs from 2006 to 2011, according to a forecast on global IP traffic released this week by Cisco.

That and consumer traffic, which will surpass business IP traffic in 2008, will cause overall IP traffic to almost double every two years through 2011, the Cisco report finds. Total IP traffic will nearly quintuple in the five-year period from 2006 to 2011, driven by high definition video and high speed broadband penetration, the firm says.

Cisco’s report is based on its own estimates plus projections from 10 market analysis firms on the number of Internet users, broadband connections, video subscribers, mobile connections, and Internet application adoption.

Click to see: Cisco's expectations of Internet traffic

On the business side, Cisco found that business IP traffic -- all fixed IP WAN or Internet traffic generated by organizations -- will grow fastest in developing markets and Asia-Pacific. North America, Western Europe and Japan will have slower growth rates.

In volume, North America will continue to have the most business IP traffic through 2011, followed by Western Europe and then Asia-Pacific.

Meanwhile, business Internet traffic -- all IP traffic that crosses an Internet backbone -- will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 23% from 2006 to 2011, driven by increased broadband penetration in the small business segment.

Overshadowing that will be consumer IP traffic, which will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 58% from 2006 to 2011. Consumer IP traffic will surpass 17 exabytes per month by 2011, the Cisco study found. Business IP traffic at that time will be 10 exabytes.

Forty percent of consumer IP traffic will be Internet traffic, while 60% will be traffic generated by the delivery of traditional commercial video services over IP within a single operator’s network, according to Cisco. This is a “dramatic” shift from the composition of 2005 consumer IP traffic, over 80% of which is Internet traffic, the Cisco report states.

Internet traffic is still dominated by peer-to-peer (P2P) applications and this trend is not slowing, the Cisco report finds. P2P traffic will more than quadruple from 649 petabytes per month in 2006 to 2,836 petabytes per month in 2011.

P2P made up 50% of all consumer Internet traffic in 2006, but despite quadrupling in size, will only make up 39% of consumer Internet traffic in 2011, the Cisco study finds.