Are Cisco’s Internet projections too bearish? That’s what a blogger at MarketWatch believes based on his own analysis of… Cisco’s predictions from years past.
Cody Willard gave a rundown of Cisco’s Internet growth projections dating back to 2006, and up to and including this year. What he found was that Cisco has been a bit too pessimistic in its forecasts for the past five years. To wit:
Here’s what Cisco was predicting this same kind of report back in 2006:
After a brief mid-decade slowdown, IP traffic will nearly double every two years through 2011. Total IP traffic will nearly quadruple in the four-year period from 2007 to 2011. Driven by high-definition video and high-speed broadband penetration, consumer IP traffic will bolster the overall IP growth rate so that it sustains a fairly steady growth rate through 2011, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 46 percent and nearly quadrupling the monthly traffic run rate from 2007 to 2011.
And here’s what Cisco said about Internet traffic in their most recent report:
Global mobile data traffic grew 2.6-fold in 2010, nearly tripling for the third year in a row.
Yup, back in 2006, Cisco in this same report was looking for a 46% annual growth rate in Internet traffic in the coming five years…when in reality it turned out that the annual growth rate was closer to 300%.
Willard found similar conservatism in subsequent annual projections leading up to this year’s forecast – the percentage of consumer video traffic on the Internet (from 30% in 2011 back in 2007, to over 40% in this year’s study); the rate of monthly growth, in exabytes – although, unless we’re missing something, it looks pretty accurate…
In 2006: According to this forecast, global IP traffic in 2007 stands at more than 6 exabytes per month, more than quadrupling to reach 29 exabytes per month in 2011.
In 2011: According to this forecast, global IP traffic in 2010 stands at 20.2 exabytes per month and quadruples by 2015, to reach 80.5 exabytes per month.
…and in the number of DVDs or movies that can be downloaded in a specific amount of time – from 2008’s projection that by 2013, 10 billion DVDs will cross the Internet each month, to this year’s forecast that the gigabyte equivalent of all movies ever made will cross global IP networks every five minutes.
Summarizes Willard:
Guys, do you see a pattern here? Cisco’s own optimistic industry analysis of the growth of the Internet and the apps/games/movies/work/etc that ride on top of it are, even as optimistic as they seem, ALWAYS way too pessimistic.
Better to be safe than sorry.
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