Bandwidth is growing at lightning speed

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"Business video conferencing is expected to grow 10-fold over the forecast period, growing almost three times as fast as overall IP traffic," CiscoCisco said.

CiscoCisco

"Service providers are faced with evolving bandwidth and scalability requirements as residential, business and mobile consumers continue to demonstrate a healthy appetite for advanced video services across a variety of networks and devices," Patel said in a statement released by the firm.

Internet protocol "(IP) networks must be intelligent and flexible enough to support this tremendous variety of traffic growth," Patel said.

Online traffic

"By 2014, consumer IP traffic will represent 87 per cent of monthly total global IP traffic while business IP traffic will represent 13 per cent of monthly total global IP traffic," says Patel.

For years, peer-to-peer internet applications for sharing and downloading movies and music on the web have generated the largest amount of electronic traffic.

Not any longer.

CiscoCisco, based in San Jose, California is predicting that global internet video conferencing traffic between private and business computer users will surpass peer-to-peer by the end of this year.

In other words, while P2P marvels such as LimeWire and The Pirate Bay won't disappear any time soon, personal and private webcam-based network giants such as Skype, MSN Messenger and CiscoCisco will soon be the dominant players.

"For the first time in the last 10 years, peer-to-peer traffic will not be the largest internet traffic type," said CiscoCisco. "The global online video community will include more than one billion users by the end of 2010."

CiscoCisco uses a simple example to give web users a relevant sense of video demand in coming years.

"By 2014, it would take more than two years to watch the amount of video that will cross global IP networks every second; to watch all the video crossing the network would take 72 million years," the report stated.

CiscoCisco offers other predictions, among them; that "global internet traffic will increase more than fourfold to 767 exabytes, or more than three-quarters of a zettabyte by 2014".

Per month, that works out to nearly 64 exabytes or the equivalent to 16 million DVDs, 21 trillion MP3s or 399 quadrillion text messages.

To put the astronomical figures into perspective, one can look to much smaller essential standard computer measurements, the yardsticks of electronic file size.

For example, the most easily recognised measurement is the megabyte (MB) — an average digitised Hollywood movie contains 700 MB or more.

One thousand megabytes equals a gigabyte (GB) and 1,000 GB equals one terabyte, the size of some new external hardrives for laptops on the electronic market in Dubai.

According to a chart by CiscoCisco, "a digital library of all books ever written in any language" would contain about 400 terabytes.

One thousand terabytes equals what's called one exabyte and CiscoCisco says that total internet traffic by 2014 will be 767 exabytes.

CiscoCisco suggests that consumer cravings for moving imagery will also boost fledgling demand currently for three-dimensional and high-definition content 13 per cent by 2014.

In five years, 3-D and HD video is "forecast to comprise 42 per cent of total consumer internet video traffic," CiscoCisco said.

Mobile broadband is also expected to balloon in years to come by 39 times from 2009 to 2014.

By that time, "annual global mobile data traffic will reach 3.5 exabytes per month," the report said.

One of the main reasons behind the unparalleled growth rates online, CiscoCisco said, is a substantially improved technological ability to move more data at higher rates of speed on higher bandwidth networks.

"In just a decade, the average global residential internet connection download speed has increased 35 times which has helped to dramatically increase internet usage," CiscoCisco said.

So how much is a zettabyte?

1 petabyte = 1,000 terabytes or 250,000 DVDs

1 exabyte = 1,000 petabytes or 250 million DVDs

1 zettabyte = 1,000 exabytes or 250 billion DVDs

1 yottabyte = 1,000 zettabytes or 250 trillion DVDs

SOURCE: Cisco

measure

By Derek Baldwin

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