Cisco predicts that total worldwide Internet usage will grow from 72 Exabytes (an Exabyte being one billion Gigabytes) per month in 2015 to 168 Exabytes per month in 2019. That’s an astounding 33% growth per year. They published a short chart of the history of global Internet bandwidth which is eye-popping. Following are some historical and predicted statistics of worldwide bandwidth usage:
- 1992 100 GB per day
- 1997 100 GB per hour
- 2002 100 GB per second
- 2007 2,000 GB per second
- 2014 16,144 GB per second
- 2019 51,794 GB per second
We know that the current bandwidth usage on the Internet has been driven by an explosion of residential video consumption. Cisco predicts that video will keep growing at a rapid pace. They predict that video bandwidth worldwide will grow from 40 Exabytes per month in 2015 to 140 Exabytes per month in 2019, an increase of 37% per year. Those volumes include all kinds of IP video including Netflix type services, IP Video on Demand, video files exchanged through file sharing, video-streamed gaming, and videoconferencing.
Perhaps the fastest growing segment of the Internet is Machine-to-Machine traffic. Cisco predicts M2M traffic will grow from 0.5 Petabytes (a Petabyte is 1 million Gigabytes) per month in 2015 to 4.6 Petabytes per month in 2019, an astounding 210% annual increase. The Internet has always had a core of M2M traffic as the devices that run the web communicate with each other. But all of the billions of devices we are now adding to the web annually also do some coordination. This can vary from the big bandwidth uses like smart cars to a smartphone or PC that is checking to see if it has the latest version of a software update.
Cisco also predicts that Internet speeds will get faster. For example, for North America they predict that from 2014 to 2019 the percentage of homes that can buy data speeds faster than 10 Mbps will grow from 58% to 74%, those that buy speeds greater than 25 Mbps will grow 33% to 45% and those that buy data speeds faster than 100 Mbps will grow from 2% to 8%.
They aren’t quite as rosy for cellular data speeds. They predict that North American speeds will grow from an average of 3 Mbps in 2015 to 6.4 Mbps in 2019. But they show that mobile devices now carry the majority of the data traffic worldwide. In 2014 mobile devices carried 54% of worldwide data traffic and by 2019 they predict that mobile devices will carry about 67% of worldwide traffic. It’s important to remember that outside of the US and Europe that mobile devices are the predominant gateway to broadband usage. Cisco also shows that the vast majority of mobile device traffic use WiFi rather than cellular networks.
Perhaps the statistic that matters most to network engineers is that busy hour traffic (the busiest 60-minute period of the day) is growing about 5% faster per year than the growth of average traffic. ISPs need to buy capacity to handle the busy hour and the demands of video traffic are increasingly coming in the busiest hours.
Cisco shows that the volumes of metro traffic (traffic that stays within a region) already passed long-haul traffic in 2014, and by 2019 they predict that 66% of all web traffic will be metro traffic.