14 DAY TRIAL // Cisco, the renowned communications hardware and software maker, has issued a forecast of IP traffic for the coming years. The company expects IP traffic to increase fivefold compared to today, reaching two-thirds of a zettabyte by 2013. That's two thirds of a trillion gigabytes with a compound annual growth rate of 40 percent.
Cisco believes than an important part of that traffic will be online videos, which will make up 90 percent of all consumer IP traffic by 2013, reaching over 18 exabytes per month. And an increasing part of the video traffic will be video communications, which the company predicts will increase ten times by 2013 compared to 2008.
Mobile online video watching is also expected to rise spectacularly, reaching 64 percent of the total mobile IP traffic in 2013, growing from 33 petabytes in a month in 2008 to an estimated 2,184 petabytes, 2 exabytes, per month in 2013. The increase represents a 131 percent annual growth rate. However mobile IP traffic will still be only 4 percent of the total IP traffic.
Peer-to-peer traffic is also expected to increase but its percentage of the overall IP traffic will decline by 2013. P2P networks currently use 3.3 exabytes per month and the numbers are expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 18 percent. However, overall P2P traffic will decline to only 20 percent of the total consumer IP traffic coming from 50 percent in 2008. Cisco expects file hosting services to grow instead at a much bigger rate of 58 percent per year reaching 3.2 exabytes per month in 2013.
While optimistic numbers are expected to come from a company that relies on traffic growth to sell more of its associated services and hardware, they should provide a good estimate for the future IP traffic.