Every one of my clients continues to see explosive growth of data traffic on their broadband networks. For several years I’ve been citing a statistic used for many years by Cisco that says that household use of data has doubled every three years since 1980. In Cisco’s last Visual Networking Index published in 2017 the company predicted a slight slowdown in data growth to now double about every 3.5 years.

I searched the web for other predictions of data growth and found a report published by Seagate, also in 2017, titled Data Age 2025: The Evolution of Data to Life-Critical. This report was authored for Seagate by the consulting firm IDC.

The IDC report predicts that annual worldwide web data will grow from the 16 zettabytes of data used in 2016 to 163 zettabytes in 2025 – a tenfold increase in nine years. A zettabyte is a mind-numbingly large number that equals a trillion gigabytes. That increase means an annual compounded growth rate of 29.5%, which more than doubles web traffic every three years.

The most recent burst of overall data growth has come from the migration of video online. IDC expects online video to keep growing rapidly, but also foresees a number of other web uses that are going to increase data traffic by 2025. These include:

• The continued evolution of data from business background to “life-critical”. IDC predicts that as much as 20% of all future data will become life-critical, meaning it will directly impact our daily lives, with nearly half of that data being hypercritical. As an example, they mention the example of how a computer crash today might cause us to lose a spreadsheet, but that data used to communicate with a self-driving car must be delivered accurately. They believe that the software needed to ensure such accuracy will vastly increase the volume of traffic on the web.
• The proliferation of embedded systems and the IoT. Today most IoT devices generate tiny amounts of data. The big growth in IoT data will not come directly from the IoT devices and sensors in the world, but from the background systems that interpret this data and make it instantly usable.
• The increasing use of mobile and real-time data. Again, using the self-driving car as an example, IDC predicts that more than 25% of data will be required in real-time, and the systems necessary to deliver real-time data will explode usage on networks.
• Data usage from cognitive computing and artificial intelligence systems. IDC predicts that data generated by cognitive systems – machine learning, natural language processing and artificial intelligence – will generate more than 5 zettabytes by 2025.
• Security systems. As we have more critical data being transmitted, the security systems needed to protect the data will generate big volumes of additional web traffic.

Interestingly, this predicted growth all comes from machine-to-machine communications that are a result of us moving more daily functions onto the web. Computers will be working in the background exchanging and interpreting data to support activities such as traveling in a self-driving car or chatting with somebody in another country using a real-time interpreter. We are already seeing the beginning stages of numerous technologies that will require big real time data.

Data growth of this magnitude is going to require our data networks to grow in capacity. I don’t know of any client network that is ready to handle a ten-fold increase in data traffic, and carriers will have to beef up backbone networks significantly over time. I have often seen clients invest in new backbone electronics that they hoped to be good for a decade, only to find the upgraded networks swamped within only a few years. It’s hard for network engineers and CEOs to fully grasp the impact of continued rapid data growth on our networks and it’s more common than not to underestimate future traffic growth.

This kind of data growth will also increase the pressure for faster end-user data speeds and more robust last-mile networks. If a rural 10 Mbps DSL line feels slow today, imagine how slow that will feel when urban connections are far faster than today. If the trends IDC foresees hold true, by 2025 there will be many homes needing and using gigabit connections. It’s common, even in the industry to scoff at the usefulness of residential gigabit connections, but when our use of data needs keeps doubling it’s inevitable that we will need gigabit speeds and beyond.