Over the past several years, we’ve covered the annual Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI), which projects IP traffic trends based upon independent analyst forecasts, usage surveys from operators and other primary research. Cisco recently announced the latest update to its VNI Forecast for 2010-2015. Top line prediction: Cisco’s most recent report projects reaching nearly a zettabyte (which is equal to a sextillion bytes, or a trillion gigabytes) of annual IP traffic by 2015.
From a global perspective including both enterprise and consumer IP traffic, Cisco has identified four primary growth drivers:
1. An increasing number of devices: The proliferation of tablets, mobile phones, connected appliances and other smart machines is driving up the demand for connectivity. By 2015, there will be nearly 15 billion network connections via devices — including machine-to-machine — and more than two connections for each person on earth.
ANALYSIS: Gauging the volume
2. More Internet users: By 2015, there will be nearly 3 billion Internet users — more than 40% of the world’s projected population.
3. Faster broadband speed: The average fixed broadband speed is expected to increase fourfold, from 7 megabits per second in 2010 to 28Mbps in 2015. The average broadband speed has already doubled within the past year from 3.5Mbps to 7Mbps.
4. More video: By 2015, 1 million video minutes — the equivalent of 674 days of video content — will traverse the Internet every second.
When it comes to business IP traffic, the study predicts a 24% compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24% from 2010 to 2015. Increased enterprise adoption of advanced video communications will cause business IP traffic to grow by a factor of 2.7 between 2010 and 2015. Not unexpectedly, business Internet traffic will grow slightly faster than IP WAN, with IP WAN CAGR of 18% expected compared to a 19% CAGR for fixed business Internet.
For the five-year forecast period, business video conferencing is expected to increase sixfold, at a 41% CAGR from 2010-2015. The VNI notes that Web-based video conferencing reached 50% of total business video conferencing traffic in 2010 and it is growing faster than average business video conferencing, at a CAGR of 45%.
Cisco has made the results available to the public, along with an online tool so users can manipulate the date to build custom presentation of the data. For more on the study, including access to the methodology, detailed data and the user tool, please click here; a brief (16 minutes) video overview of the VNI highlights is also available here.
Our thanks to Cisco for sharing this annual study.
