The annual Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) Forecast (2011-2016), the company’s ongoing initiative to forecast and analyze Internet Protocol (IP) networking growth and trends worldwide, quantitatively projects 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.
By 2016, annual global IP traffic is forecast to be over a zettabyte (a zettabyte is 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 the total amount of global IP traffic generated in 2011 (369 exabytes).
Sanjay Rohatgi, Senior Vice President, Service Provider, Cisco India & SAARC, commented, “The Internet plays a pivotal role, for emerging countries like India, to address its ambitions. The findings from the Cisco Visual Networking Index report, project a staggering growth for Internet traffic in India. Increasing video consumption, fueled by adoption of new technologies like 3G and 4G and the government’s efforts towards the last mile connectivity will be the key drivers. Eventually, all these would help India transition to a fully networked economy.”
This significant level of traffic growth and service penetration is driven by a number of factors, including:
- An increasing number of devices: The proliferation of tablets, mobile phones, and other smart devices as well as machine-to-machine (M2M) connections are driving up the demand for connectivity. By 2016, the forecast projects there will be nearly 18.9 billion network connections―almost 2.5 connections for each person on earth as compared to 10.3 billion in 2011. India will have two billion networked devices by 2016- double from devices in 2011 which stood at 1 billion.
- More Internet users: By 2016, there are expected to be 3.4 billion Internet users and about 45% of the world’s projected population according to United Nations estimates. India Internet traffic will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 64% between 2011 to 2016. In India, there will be 212 million fixed Internet users in 2016 (excluding mobile only), up from 85 million in 2011. TVs will account for 6% of consumer Internet video traffic in 2016.
- Faster broadband speeds: The average fixed broadband speed is expected to increase nearly fourfold, from 9 Mbps in 2011 to 34 Mbps in 2016. In India average fixed broadband speed is expected to grow 4.2 fold, during this period, from 1.5 Mbps to 6 Mbps.
- More video: By 2016, 1.2 million video minutes, the equivalent of 833 days (or over two years), would travel the Internet every second. In India Internet video will be 70% of all Internet traffic in 2016, up from 30% in 2011.
- Wi-Fi growth: By 2016, over half of the world’s Internet traffic is expected to come from Wi-Fi connections.
