<videovortex> By 2013 Video Will Be 90 Percent Of All Consumer IP Traffic And 64 Percent of Mobile

[Geert Lovink]

Cisco: By 2013 Video Will Be 90 Percent Of All Consumer IP Traffic And  
64 Percent of Mobile
37 Comments
by Erick Schonfeld on June 9, 2009

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/09/cisco-by-2013-video-will-be-90-percent-of-all-consumer-ip-traffic-and-64-percent-of-mobile/

By 2013, annual global IP traffic will reach two-thirds of a  
zettabyte, according to a new forecast of IP traffic issued by Cisco  
today. What is a zettabyte? It is a trillion gigabytes, dummy. (I had  
to look that up too). And that number represents more than a fivefold  
increase in IP traffic from today. (See the forecast in the tables  
below).

What is driving this growth is video. Cisco forecasts that 90 percent  
of consumer IP traffic (which makes up the majority of total IP  
traffic) will be video in 2013. Cisco also predicts that mobile data  
traffic will also be overtaken by video, reaching 64 percent of total  
mobile IP traffic by 2013. Part of this might be wishful thinking on  
Cisco’s part, which needs broadband usage growth to continue apace in  
order to sell its networking gear. But part of it is also the fact  
that these numbers are based on the percentage of bits traveling over  
those broadband pipes, and it doesn’t take a lot of fat video files to  
fill those up.

Cisco is a big believer in the growth of mobile video, expecting it to  
grow from 33 petabytes a month in 2008 to 2,184 petabytes (or 2  
exabytes) a month in 2013, which represents a 131 percent compound  
annual growth rate. (No wonder it bought the maker of the Flip video  
camera). As impressive as those numbers sound, at that point, mobile  
data will only make up 4 percent of total IP traffic. (Good thing  
Apple finally decided to get with the program and add video to its  
upcoming iPhone 3GS). In the chart below, you can see how big a role  
Cisco expects video to play in mobile data traffic. Video is the green  
part of the bar graphs. Standalone data (dark blue) is also expected  
to grow quickly.

(more...)