Cisco Sees a Zettaflood of IP Traffic – Driven by Video

Written by Ryan Lawler

Monday, June 16. 2008 at 05:25 PM EDT 2 comments

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Driven primarily by an explosion in online video, total IP traffic is expected to reach half a zettabyte by 2012, according to new research by Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO).

With traffic nearly doubling every two years, the Cisco Visual Networking Index forecasts IP traffic to increase by a factor of six from 6.6 million exabytes per month in 2007 to 44 exabytes per month -- or an annual run rate of 522 exabytes per year -- in 2012. (A zettabyte is 1,000 exabytes. Or, it's a 1 with 21 zeros behind it, for you non-math geeks.)

Now, not everybody agrees on the exact numbers. Research company IDC recently predicted that by 2011, there will be 1.8 zettabytes of traffic in existence -- anywhere.

Cisco says that much of the growth of data traffic has come in the past few years. Traffic grew 55 percent in 2007, and is expected to grow 63 percent in 2008.

While traffic grew across all applications in 2007, growth is increasingly driven by online video. IP video grew from 12 percent of consumer IP traffic in 2006 to 22 percent in 2007, and is forecast to make up 32 percent of all consumer IP traffic by the end of this year. That growth is set to continue, with Internet video to the PC, or over-the-top (OTT) video expected to make up one half of all consumer IP traffic in 2012.

Non-Internet IP video -- that which drives IPTV or cable video traffic in the metro -- will grow even faster, according to Cisco. The company forecasts consumer IPTV and CATV traffic over metro IP networks to have a 68 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2012, compared to 43 percent for overall consumer Internet traffic.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic is also growing, but at a slower pace than other parts of the market. Although P2P file-sharing networks carry 600 more petabytes per month than they had in mid-2007, P2P traffic as a percentage of overall IP traffic actually fell. P2P made up 51 percent of consumer Internet traffic in 2007, compared with 60 percent in 2006.

Unsurprisingly, the most explosive segment of Internet traffic growth has yet to come in the mobile sector, which is just now in its infancy. Mobile data usage grew from just 7 petabytes per month in 2006 to 26 petabytes in 2007. And it won't stop there -- mobile data usage is expected to grow to 1.5 exabytes per month in 2012, a 125 percent CAGR from 2007.