Research warns of IP traffic explosion

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New research has forecast that business and consumer internet protocol (IP) traffic combined will almost double every two years up to 2011.

That was the main finding of a forecast on global IP traffic released this week by Cisco, with video cited as the main cause in this data explosion.

Although the report said consumer IP traffic would surpass that created by business by 2008, video will be responsible for a 21 per cent compound annual growth rate in business IP traffic across wide area networks (WANs) from 2006 to 2011.

The report said: "Thanks to the YouTube effect, online video has grown rapidly."

But it was quick to stress that video communications and dynamic video content, like interactive TV, would contribute as much to the surge in IP traffic as pre-recorded content.

Cisco based its projections on its own estimates and those from 10 market analysis firms on the number of internet users, broadband connections, video subscribers, mobile connections and the rates of internet application adoption by global region.

The report also found that developing markets and Asia-Pacific will lead the way in generating the highest volumes of business IP traffic, which it classified as all fixed IP WAN or internet traffic generated by organisations. Growth rates will be slower in Western Europe, North America and Japan.

But by volume, Western Europe will follow just behind North America as the biggest generator of business IP traffic in 2011, with Japan rounding out the top three.

Also, business internet traffic, which is classified as all IP traffic that crosses an internet backbone, will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 23 per cent from 2006 to 2011.

According to Cisco, this will be driven by increased broadband penetration in the small business segment.

It also found mobile internet will grow by a factor of 17, reaching 63 petabytes per month. Over the next few years, it said portable computers with HSPA and WiMAX cards will drive traffic growth. Together, traffic from 3.5G and WiMAX will make up more than half of all mobile data traffic by 2011.

Overall, the research said today's "bandwidth hog" will become tomorrow's average user.

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