Internet Will Continue Rapid Growth, Cisco Predicts
The number of network-connected devices will soar to more than 15 billion by 2015, and global Internet traffic will quadruple to 966 exabytes per year, Cisco predicted Wednesday in its much-watched annual Internet forecast. By 2015, 3 billion people will use the Internet, more than 40 percent of the world’s projected population. The Visual Networking Index Forecast is the fifth annual installment.
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Video will be a huge factor in growth, with 1 million video minutes traversing the Internet every second in 2015, the report said. The number of people who watch video on the Net is forecast to nearly double by 2015 to 1.5 billion. Wireless connections also will be increasingly important. PCs generated 97 percent of consumer Internet traffic in 2010, but that will fall to 87 percent by 2015, reflecting growth in tablets, smartphones and connected TVs, the report said. Wireless data traffic will increase 26-fold from 2010 to 2015, to 6.3 exabytes per month, Cisco projected. Device-to-device traffic is also driving growth. By 2015, there will be almost 15 billion network connections via devices -- including machine-to-machine, “more than two connections for each person on earth,” the forecast said.
Markets will also shift, Cisco predicted. By 2015, the Asia Pacific region will generate the most IP traffic (24.1 exabytes per month), surpassing current leader North America. Asia and the Middle East are expected to be the fastest growing markets, the report said.
Blair Levin, architect of the FCC’s National Broadband Plan, called the numbers “scary” during a panel Cisco hosted as it unveiled its projections. The report offers more evidence of the need to get more spectrum in play for wireless broadband, Levin said. “We actually thought that there would be a spectrum crunch before the tablet came out, imagine what we would think now,” he said. A question largely ignored by policymakers to date is “how does a country, not in one year or two years, but over a 10- to 20- to 30-year period reallocate spectrum,” he said. “Spectrum has basically already been allocated, the question is how do you reallocate it. … Every country needs to have a methodology of reallocation.”
The challenge facing the nation is also far different than getting voice communications across the U.S. in 1925, Levin said. Policymakers largely ignore that reality as they discuss universal broadband deployment, Levin said. “Voice was pretty binary -- you either had it or you didn’t,” he said. “The meaning of broadband, getting broadband everywhere is a completely different thing. Here again we are currently having a debate on Universal Service, which fundamentally ignores that the old paradigm will not work in how we think about delivering broadband, because broadband is not a single product. It’s a number of different things.”
Five years ago no one could have foreseen the numbers released Wednesday, said Robert Pepper, Cisco vice president of government affairs. Cisco’s estimates have proven conservative thus far, he said. “It’s being managed and the investment is following the applications,” Pepper said. The question is what happens when carriers “hit the wall” and can no longer add capacity by improvements to their current networks, he said. “For example, there’s a point at which copper, even with VDSL, is going to hit a limit. Then the question is not incremental improvement. Then you're talking about a very significant investment to get to the next level. The question is will that happen?”