International traffic now is 90 percent video, according to Pacnet CEO William Barney, whose firm now is building data centers on its Pacific region network to support a variety of video traffic types, ranging from cable TV to streaming video.
Separately, Cisco estimates that Internet video is now over one third of all consumer Internet traffic, and will approach 40 percent of consumer Internet traffic by the end of 2010, not including the amount of video exchanged through P2P file sharing.
Video became the dominant form of mobile data traffic in 2010, accounting for more than 40 percent of the total volume in wireless networks worldwide, according to Bytemobile. Bytemobile expects mobile data traffic to spike to an all-time high in 2011, when video-based content will account for over 60 percent of network traffic.
No matter how you look at it, traffic on networks is mostly video; everything else is essentially rounding error, or will be, shortly. Traffic isn’t revenue, of course, but all networks now have to be built for video, in substantial ways, much as they once were built for voice.
