You may have noticed the headline earlier this year in May that said that bot traffic had surpassed human traffic on the Internet. The bigger news since then is that, in a matter of months, bot traffic has grown to be nearly two-thirds of the traffic on our networks. Mitch Wagner wrote an opinion piece in Fierce Network that describes the foreseeable future impact of the growth of machine-to-machine traffic on our networks. It’s not a future that is going to be comfortable for the many small ISPs I work with.

Wagner correctly observes that the growth of bot traffic poses a problem for telcos that have built their networks to provide services to people and companies. I remember, early in my career, conducting traffic studies to understand the busy-hour on clients’ voice networks to help them make sure they had sufficient capacity. That’s still standard practice in sizing backbone connections and in designing fiber network electronics.

However, the growth of bot traffic changes the equation of sizing and managing networks. We are at the earliest stages of the explosion of bot traffic, and already we’re seeing changes in networks since unexpected traffic can show up with no warning. Lumen is already starting to change the way it charges for network usage and is starting to bill bot networks for actual usage instead of the standard model we’ve always used of charging by bandwidth capacity. Unfortunately, most ISPs are not going to know the source of bot traffic.

Bot traffic hasn’t made a big impact on ISP last-mile networks yet, but according to Wagner it will. He cites Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, who recently told The Verge that automated traffic could reach 1,000 times human traffic within five years. Today, ISPs are seeing bursts of traffic from hackers or bots scraping web sites. On the upload network, we’re seeing increased traffic volumes from cameras and other devices controlled by AI. Any ISP serving an automated factory is likely already seeing increased volumes and a demand for lower latency.

Wagner warns that the bot traffic we’re seeing today is only the beginning and that the biggest burst in network traffic will come from physical AI – robots, self-driving vehicles, automated factories and warehouses, smart-city applications, and automated logistics. Wager cites an earlier article he wrote in April that said that cellular networks could run out of upload capacity in places by 2029.

Big ISPS are already implementing ways to deal with the issues coming from big traffic growth. There is an explosion in the construction of long-haul fiber networks. Verizon says it is automating the way it reacts to bursts of traffic and how it responds to malicious traffic.

But Wagner’s conclusions aren’t comforting to other ISPs, and maybe not even to the big ones. He says network operators need to keep control of their networks while they can still do so, but that ultimately we need to shift to autonomous networks run by AI to fight back against AI-powered threats. I don’t have the slightest idea of what that means for small last-mile providers, but it sounds expensive, and it sounds like giving up control of your networks. It’s likely that the prediction that bot traffic will be a thousand times greater than people traffic is exaggerated. But if it is exaggerated by a factor of ten, it still means momentous changes in ISP networks.