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.

Exabytes

From bites to bytes - Last year, manufacturers shipped 5.1 exabytes of storage devices. An exabyte is a quintillion bytes, or a thousand trillion. Below are some more interesting tidbits about exabytes and the internet.

* In 2004, global monthly Internet traffic passed 1 exabyte for the first time and six years later, it is estimated at 21 exabytes per month, or 252 exabytes per year.

* Mobile data traffic is growing faster than non-mobile traffic, has tripled each year for the past three years, and is projected to rise another 26-fold to about 75 exabytes per year by 2015. (The top 1 percent of mobile data subscribers generate over 20 percent of mobile data traffic,)  

* Non-mobile internet traffic has averaged 151% growth each year since 1997.

* By 2013, annual global internet traffic will reach two-thirds of a zettabyte or 667 exabytes.

* Global mobile data traffic will reach over two exabytes per month by 2013.

*  It is estimated that there was 988 exabytes of data created last year, 2010. That is over 18 million times the amount of information contained in all the books ever written.

Bytes in Perspective

Below is the sequence of names for describing digital information - Think of a byte as a letter or number, such as 1 or T.  A kilobyte is exactly1,024 bytes, but common usage rounds it to a thousand. One page of text is about one kilobyte.

Here are some more comparisons to give you a sense of scale - A terabyte is roughly a trillion bytes and our national debt is measured in trillions of dollars. One terabyte can hold about 3.6 million images or about 300 hours of good quality video. A terabyte can hold 1,000 copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Ten terabytes can hold the total printed collection of the Library of Congress. We are adding about a terabyte of information to the internet roughly every minute of every day.

kilobyte (kB)     10³
megabyte (MB) 10⁶
gigabyte (GB)   10⁹
terabyte (TB)    10¹²
petabyte (PB)   10¹⁵
exabyte (EB)     10¹⁸
zettabyte (ZB)   10²¹     
yottabyte           10²⁴

There are more names going up to ten to the 63rd power, but only those above have so far been approved. I have a friend who is so old, he remembers plain old bytes, now we have moved from Kilobytes to Exabytes. Hope to be around for the Yottabyte revolution.

Gigabytes, Terabytes, and Petabytes

One gigabyte of storage cost $228 in 1998 and costs about 88 cents today. A gigabyte holds about 7 minutes of a HD TV movie.

A terabyte is 1,024 gigabytes. The first terabyte hard drive came out in 2007. In May 2009, Yahoo! Groups had 40 terabytes of data to index.

There is an even larger scale these days, petabytes. One petabyte is 1,024 terabytes. A petabyte holds 13.3 years of HD TV movies. To provide more perspective, Google processes an average of about 20 petabytes of data per day. Finally, 50 petabytes is equal to the entire written history of mankind from the beginning of recorded history. What's next? An exabyte is 1024 petabytes.