Cisco’s latest forecast report, called “Cisco Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2008-2013” estimates that gobal IP traffic will continue to rise at a CAGR of 40% p.a. as more users gain more IP capabilities in more applications and more countries around the world. Of course, the report mentions traffic volumes that are unimaginable – 56 exabytes/month in 2012 for example. (that’s 1 x 10¹⁸).

Highlights of the report:

• P2P will grow, but not as a % of total traffic.
• IP video is about 1/3rd of all consumer Internet traffic (not including P2P video sharing).
• In 2013, Internet video will be 700 x more traffic than the capacity of the US Internet backbone in 2000.
• IP TV and Video on Demand will grow significantly.
• Video communications (both over Internet and over private IP backbones) will grow 10 x in the period.
• Mobile Internet will reach 2 EBytes/month by 2013 and 2/3rds of that will be mobile video traffic.

Table 3 shows that video has already overtaken spam (99% of email is spam, so why not call it spam?) sometime in the waning months of 2008. Column 2 of table 3 of the white paper says that 2009 consumer web and email accounts for 1,595 PetaBytes while the four classes of the faster growing video service accounts for 2,852 PetaBytes.

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