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.