Greater mobile access and growing demand for online video are among the principal factors that will fuel a tripling in IP traffic from 2014-2019, according to the 10th annual Cisco Visual Networking Index Forecast.
By 2019, IP network traffic will have reached a record-high 2 zettabytes, Cisco predicts. Growing numbers of Internet users, personal connected devices and machine-to-machine (M2M) connections, along with faster broadband speeds and growing adoption of advanced video services, will help drive rapid growth in IP network traffic over the five-year period, the report authors add.
IP Traffic Forecast
Taken together, these drivers will result in IP network traffic increasing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23 percent out to 2019 – “the first global CAGR increase in consecutive VNI forecasts in nearly a decade,” Cisco Vice President of Service Provider Products and Solutions Marketing Doug Webster highlights.
Come 2019, more traffic will be flowing across IP networks than in all prior “Internet years (from 1984 to the end of 2013),” Cisco adds.
Notably, more than two-thirds of global IP traffic will originate from mobile connections, including Wi-Fi, according to Cisco.
Cisco elaborates further on these growth drivers:
Faster Fixed Broadband Speeds – Globally, the average fixed broadband speed will increase two-fold from 20.3 Mbps in 2014 to 42.5 Mbps in 2019. By 2019, 33 percent of all global fixed broadband connections will be faster than 25 Mbps, up from 29 percent today.
New and Advanced Video Services – IP video will account for 80 percent of all IP traffic by 2019, up from 67 percent in 2014.
Mobility Momentum – By 2019, more than 14 percent of monthly IP traffic will derive from cellular connections, and 53 percent of monthly IP traffic will come from Wi-Fi connections globally, making differentiated and monetizable mobile strategies more important for all service providers.
The Internet of Everything (IoE) and M2M Growth – The IoE trend is showing tangible growth as M2M connections will more than triple over the next five years (growing to 10.5 billion by 2019). There will be significant IoE adoption across many business verticals.
- The connected health consumer segment will represent the fastest M2M connections growth at 8.6-fold (54 percent CAGR) from 2014 to 2019;
- The connected home segment will represent nearly half (48 percent) of M2M connections by 2019;
- Annual global M2M IP traffic will grow 15-fold over this same period—from 308 petabytes in 2014 (0.5 percent of global IP traffic) to 4.6 exabytes by 2019 (2.7 percent of global IP traffic).
Gaming Impact – Cisco predicts a marked increase in network traffic associated with game downloads driven by availability of storage capacity on gaming consoles, an increase in upstream cloud traffic, and increasing fiber connections.
Advanced Service Adoption – Online music will be the fastest-growing residential Internet service with a CAGR of 7.7 percent from 2014-2019, growing from 1.2 billion users to 1.7 billion users by 2019.
Mobile location-based service (LBS) will be the fastest growing consumer mobile service with a CAGR of 27.5 percent from 2014-19, growing from 597 million users in 2014 to more than 2 billion users by 2019.
Desktop and personal videoconferencing will be the fastest growing business Internet service with a CAGR of 23.5 percent from 2014-2019, growing from 76 million users in 2014 to 220 million users by 2019.
