SAN JOSE, CA – The ‘runaway train’ of new mobile devices coupled with an explosion of new Internet users, faster broadband speeds, and an influx of online video could strain Canadian networks over the next four years, according to a new report from Cisco.
Cisco’s annual Visual Networking Index (VNI) forecasts and analyzes Internet Protocol (IP) networking growth and trends worldwide from 2011 through 2016, quantitatively projecting the significant amount of IP traffic expected to travel public and private networks, including Internet, managed IP, and mobile data traffic generated by consumers and business users. This year, the company has also developed a new complementary study called the Cisco VNI Service Adoption Forecast, which includes global and regional residential, consumer mobile, and business services growth rates.
The report predicts that by 2016, annual global IP traffic will be 1.3 zettabytes (a zettabyte is equal to a sextillion bytes, or a trillion gigabytes). The projected increase of global IP traffic between 2015 and 2016 alone is more than 330 exabytes, which is almost equal to the total amount of global IP traffic generated in 2011 (369 exabytes).
Here at home, Canadian service providers must invest heavily in their broadband networks to stay ahead of this inevitable shift toward massive online content consumption, the report continues. Canadian-specific stats include:
– Canada will be home to 21 million Internet video users in 2016, a significant jump from the 3 million consuming these video services in 2011;
– This trend will also extend into the Web-enabled TV’s space, with TVs expected to account for 21% of all consumer video traffic in 2016;
– Canada’s average Internet traffic is forecast to reach 6 terabytes per second;
– While half of Canadians will experience connections faster than 10 megabits per second in the next four years, the average broadband speed in Canada will grow threefold from 10 Mbps last year to 30 Mbps by 2016;
– Canada will be home to 214 million networked devices by 2016, a significant increase from the 134 million in 2011. This represents 5.7 connected devices for every Canadian;
– The average smartphone in Canada will generate 1.7 gigabytes of mobile data traffic per month in 2016, a staggering 1,484% increase from the 110 megabytes generated per month in 2011. Mobile data traffic will also account for 8% of total IP traffic in 2016, up from just 1% last year;
– The gigabyte equivalent of all the movies ever made will cross Canada’s IP networks every two hours in 2016.
