Cisco Internet Predictions 2015

Each year Cisco gets its best and brightest minds together to make some predictions. The following are for the 2015 predictions.

Annual global IP (internet) traffic will surpass the zettabyte (1000 exabytes) threshold in 2016, and the two zettabyte threshold in 2019.

Global IP traffic has increased more than fivefold in the past 5 years, and will increase nearly threefold over the next 5 years. Overall, IP traffic will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23 percent to 2019.

Content delivery networks will carry 62% of Internet traffic by 2019, up from 39 percent in 2014.

Over half of all IP traffic will originate with non-PC devices by 2019, up from 40 percent in 2014.

Personal computer-originated traffic will grow at a CAGR of just 9 percent, while TVs, tablets, smartphones, and machine-to-machine (M2M) modules will have traffic growth rates of 17 percent, 65 percent, 62 percent, and 71 percent, respectively.

By 2019, Wi-Fi and mobile devices will account for 66 percent of IP traffic and wired devices will account for just 33 percent.

Global Internet traffic in 2019 will be equivalent to 64 times the volume of the entire global Internet in 2005.

The number of devices connected to IP networks will be three times the global population in 2019.

By 2019, global fixed broadband speeds will reach 43 Mbps, up from 20 Mbps in 2014.

It would take an individual over 5 million years to watch the amount of video that will cross global IP networks each month in 2019. Every second, nearly a million minutes of video content will cross the network by 2019.

Future of the Internet

Cisco does annual predictions about the internet and here are few interesting predictions for the year 2017.

• In the year 2017 more data will move on the internet than the beginning of the internet.
• The Asia pacific region will generate 36% of all internet traffic by 2017.
• There will be 3.6 billion internet users.
• There will be over 19 billion connection.
• Internet speeds will be 3.5 times faster than 2012.
• Almost half of the world's population will have internet access.
• Personal tablet access will increase from 27 million 2012 to 190 million.
• Overall tablets will be about 425 million.
• More than 827 million TVs will have internet access.
• Average household internet traffic will increase from equivalent 13 hours of HDTV to 30.
• Smartphones and tablets will increase to 29% of all usage and PCs will slip from 88% to 57%.

Cisco has proven to be very accurate in its past predictions about the net.

Good Tech, Bad Tech, Cool Tech

Last week the annual Consumers Electronic Show happened in Las Vegas. As usual, there were thousands of whizzbang gadgets that will never hit the store shelves. Car makers were out in force with devices to tech-up new cars and take our minds off of driving. Hundreds of toys, games, bots, and tablets were on display, but almost no PCs. The buzz is that PCs are so yesterday.

According to Cisco, 1 trillion devices will be connected to the Internet in 2013. Interesting note that Apple iPhones only made a bit over 14% of smartphone shipments during the last quarter of 2012. How far it has fallen from leader of the pack.

TVs - Of course, there was a plethora of 4K and OLED TVs that are amazing in clarity (4k is four times the definition of your HD TV, OLED is same definition as current HD, but much better quality), size (up to 100 inches), and price (up to thirty+ thousand dollars). Only thing small on them is the width of the screen at just 23mm. Samsung introduced a TV that can display two shows simultaneously. The 3D TVs that were supposed to be the next best thing to sliced bread last year were said to be dead on arrival this year.

Here are a few of my other observations:

Bad Tech, iPotty 

This is a training potty for youngsters with an ipad to distract them while they are supposed to learn what to do on the potty.

Cool Tech, Papertab - a tablet as flexible as paper and has a 10.7in plastic touchscreen display

It is as thin as a piece of paper with a fully interactive plastic touchscreen display. The tablet is powered by a second generation Intel Core i5 processor and aims to replace the need for paper. A few phones and pads will have bendable screens in the not too distant future. This technology has been discussed for a number of years, but finally has reached the demo stage and it is impressive. Samsung, who has been outselling Apple three to one has this 'Youm Flexible Display'. Awesome!

Dumb Tech, HAPIfork - This little device starts to vibrate if you are eating too fast.

Good Tech, Leap - My personal favorite (and I will be getting one when they come out in next few months) is a $69 sensor from Leap Motion that enables full control of PCs or other devices using hand and finger gestures.

The 3D motion control technology has the ability to track the movement of the user's hand (including all 10 fingers) at 290 frames per second, tracking movements to 1/100th millimeter. It will make any screen react as if it was touch screen, so you do not need to go buy a touch screen.

My observations and prognostications for the next few years: ubiquitous wireless everything, smartphones getting larger toward the 5 - 6 inch sweet spot, smartphones as the universal controller for everything from TV to stoves to robots, Apple needs a new device to remain competitive, the mouse will begin to go the way of the PC as new technologies, like touch screen and Leap become more common, personal privacy is dying faster than the rotary dial telephone, devices controlled by the mind are progressing beyond games and will continue to go mainstream, smaller proved to be not better as we went too small with phones, thinner is the new 'better'.

How Big is the Internet

Some experts say that the Internet is growing by an exabyte of data every day. To put that in perspective, an exabyte equals 250 million DVDs.

After an exabyte comes a zettabyte, which equals 1,000 exabytes. In 2011, no single data center could hold a zettabyte of information.

By 2016, Cisco predicts that data centers will be sending more 1.3 zettabytes across the Internet every year. That's the equivalent of sending all movies ever made across the Internet every 3 minutes.

The National Security Agency is building a $2 billion data center in Utah that will be the world's first to store a store a yottabyte of data. That's 1,000 zettabytes or 1 million exabytes (or 1 million billion gigabytes).

Over half of Americans have watched TV streamed from the Internet.