Cisco has issued another of its alarming summaries of how much IP traffic video will represent going forwards, saying that total IP traffic will exceed two-thirds of a zettabyte (667 exabytes) in four years. We’re not even sure what a Zettabyte is, but Wikipedia tells us it’s 1 billion terabytes so we presume that makes an exabyte a thousandth of a zettabyte, just cross out three noughts.
Cisco counts all IP traffic, and video traffic whether it is on a private network, broadcast, emailed or streamed or sent over a cable operator link or wireless network. Counting IP packets is its hobby you might say.
Cisco’s previous forecast had IP traffic growing at 522 exabytes a year by 2012 and don’t you just love good news in a recession, the economic downturn hasn’t dampened our internet traffic growth, hardly at all.
Cisco reckons we are on track for at least 510 exabytes a year in 2012, growing to 667 exabytes a year or 56 exabytes a month by 2013. In short Global internet traffic will go up by five times from 2008 to 2013 a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40%. This means that by year-end 2013, the equivalent of 10 billion DVDs will cross the Internet each month, roughly two for every grown up on the planet.
And the bad news for content owners is that Peer-to-peer (P2P) which we always thought was a Genie we had successfully put back in its lamp is still growing in volume, even if it is declining as a percentage of the total at 3.3 exabytes a month growing at a CAGR of 18%.
But it’s video where all the action is. Internet video is already a third of all consumer Internet traffic, not counting P2P file sharing and it will continue to grow to over 91% of global consumer traffic by 2013.
In 2013, Internet video will represent 700 times the bandwidth of what the total US Internet backbone was in the year 2000 and it would take half a million years to watch all the online video each month come 2013.
Video communications traffic growth is accelerating. Though still a small fraction of overall Internet traffic, video over instant messaging and video calling are experiencing high growth. Video communications traffic will increase tenfold from 2008 to 2013.
Real-time video is growing in importance. By 2013, Internet TV will be over 4% of consumer Internet traffic, and what Cisco calls ambient video will be 8% of consumer Internet traffic. Live TV has gained substantial ground in the past few years: globally, P2P TV is now slightly over 7 percent of overall P2P traffic at over 200 petabytes per month.
Video-on-demand (VoD) traffic will double every two years through 2013. Consumer IPTV and CATV traffic will grow at a 53% CAGR between 2008 and 2013, compared to a CAGR of 40% for consumer Internet traffic. One presumes that is all the shift to HD.
Cisco also says that mobile data traffic will double every year through 2013, increasing 66 times between 2008 and 2013 with a CAGR of 131% reaching over 2 exabytes per month by 2013 and that almost 64% of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video by then. Mobile video will grow at a CAGR of 150% between 2008 and 2013.
One startling statistic from Cisco is that a single laptop broadband dongles generates 450 times the data traffic of a basic cell phone. A top end phone only generates 30 times as much.
IP traffic is growing fastest in percentage terms in the Middle East and Africa, but is biggest in North America where it will reach 13 exabytes a month by 2013, just ahead of Western Europe’s 12.5 exabytes a month.