busy hour traffic – POTs and PANs

Cisco’s Latest Web Predictions

Cisco recently published their annual Visual Networking Index and as usual it’s full of interesting facts and predictions. Here are a few of the key highlights that I think small carriers will find interesting:

Busy-hour (or the busiest 60–minute period in a day) Internet traffic increased 51 percent in 2015, compared with 29–percent growth in average traffic. And it’s expected to continue to grow faster with Cisco predicting that by 2020 busy hour traffic will have increased 4.6 times while overall web usage will only double. This is a big change for network providers. Since the advent of web video we’ve seen the evenings become the busiest times on the web, but this trends shows that the evening usage is going to be far greater than the rest of the day. If a network wants to offer a satisfactory service they must design to satisfy the busy evening hours, which in four short years will be over four times busier than today.

Telco companies remember that this was the same historical pattern for voice traffic and now we see the same thing with residential broadband. It means networks must be engineered for the busy hour and are underutilized the rest of the time. Failure to design for this growth means customer dissatisfaction during the busiest hours. It also implies growing demand for faster speeds.

IP video traffic will be 82 percent of all consumer Internet traffic by 2020, up from 70 percent in 2015. As you might expect, much of the increased data traffic on the web will be driven by video and more people use the web for entertainment.

Globally, Internet traffic will reach 21 GB per capita by 2020, up from 7 GB per capital in 2015. This demonstrates that the total amount of data on the web is going to continue to grow at a torrid pace. Part of this growth will come by adding new users to the web, but web traffic everywhere is still growing rapidly.

Broadband speeds will nearly double by 2020 . . . global fixed broadband speeds will reach 47.4 Mbps, up from 24.7 Mbps in 2015. So, not only Internet volumes grow, but customers are going to demand faster speeds. These numbers are a little deceptive in that they combine business and residential fixed broadband speeds together. But still, service providers need to be prepared to increase customer speeds to keep them happy. Expect networks that can’t increase speeds to grow increasingly unpopular.

Business IP traffic will grow at a CAGR of 18% from 2015 to 2020. It’s easy to assume that video is causing consumer data usage to grow much faster than business usage, but business broadband demand is growing almost as quickly as consumer broadband demand.

Smartphone traffic will exceed PC traffic by 2020. This is pretty amazing considering that in 2015 PCs drove 53% of all web traffic while smartphones generated only 8%. But by 2020 Cisco is predicting that traffic from PCs will fall to 29% and traffic from smartphones will grow to 30%. Of course, in North America with our extensive WiFi, a lot of this smartphone traffic will end up on landline connections. To reach these numbers, mobile broadband usage will grow 53% per year through 2020.

The Ever-Growing Internet

I spent some time recently looking through several of Cisco’s periodic predictions about the future of the Internet. What is most fascinating is that they are predicting continuing rapid growth for almost every kind of Internet traffic. This is certainly a warning to all network owners – a lot more bandwidth usage will be coming your way.

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.

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