It’s common knowledge that the amount of online rich media consumption is increasing exponentially on an annual basis. But how much video traffic is projected over the next five years? And what does this growth really mean for global residential, business, and mobile subscribers and the service providers that support them? Well, to begin, we need to expand our traffic terminology. Today we live in a world of petabytes and exabytes but according to the latest findings from the Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI), we’ll need to add the term “zettabyte” to our vocabulary by 2015.
So, how much exactly is a zettabyte?
A zettabyte is roughly 1000 exabytes. To place that amount of volume in more practical terms, an exabyte alone has the capacity to hold over 36,000 years worth of HD quality video…or stream the entire Netflix catalog more than 3,000 times. A zettabyte is equivalent to about 250 billion DVDs.
By 2015, the majority of global Internet traffic (61 percent) will be in some form of video—Internet video-to-PC, Internet video-to-TV, mobile video, et al.The “dawn of the Zettabyte era” will be an unprecedented online milestone that will occur in our lifetime.
To better understand the significance of a zettabyte, we have put together an in-depth infographic to provide a visual snapshot of our online future. The way the world uses the web is changing and this infographic provides a quick Cisco perspective of what’s to come.
Are you ready for the zettabyte era? Check out the infographic here.
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Tags: data, infographic, zettabyte
One of the busiest times of the year for my team comes every June when we release the Cisco Visual Networking Index which forecasts IP Traffic growth around the globe. Now in its 5th year, the forecast, which initially started as a internal project to guide our own engineers as they innovate the next generation of networking infrastructure, has now grown to be an innovation in its own right, helping to provide data for our service provider customer and regulatory bodies alike (not to mention press, analysts, and IP groupies like yours truly.)
The top level finding of this Cisco VNI Forecast, which spans from 2010 to 2015 is that total worldwide IP traffic will increase 4x by 2015, reaching 966 exabytes or just under 1 Zettabye (which is 10 to the 21st power) To put context to rising demand of IP over the last several years, we have had to change the unit of measurement several times just to keep up with the growth…. First it we measured traffic in terms of Petabytes… then moved to Exabytes… and now are embarking on Zettabytes…(looking ahead, we’ll eventually start to use the term Yottabyte…)
Factors that are driving this growth, include:
- Video, as it is increasingly a part of nearly every networked experience. By 2015, one million minutes of video – nearly two years worth – will cross the network every second.
- More devices are connecting to the network – we forecast more than 15 billion will be on the network by 2015, making it on average more than two devices (whether it be a PC, phone, TV, or even machine-to-machine) per person for every person on earth (and if you’re like me, you’re an “overachiever” on this number, with well over a dozen devices connected to the network…by the way, just how many network connections are you responsible for?) Read More »
Tags: forecast, internet growth, internet traffic, ip traffic, research, Service Provider, visual networking index, vni, zettabyte
