Internet Video To Keep Eating More Bandwidth: Cisco Study

Internet video consumption will more than quadruple from 2011 to 2016, as billions of users worldwide -- with more devices, on increasingly faster connections -- will drive overall network traffic usage to unprecedented peaks, according to Cisco Systems' latest annual network forecast.

By 2016, the amount of annual global Internet-protocol traffic will be 1.3 Zettabytes (equivalent to 1.3 trillion Gigabytes), according to the Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) Forecast for 2011-2016. By comparison, the total amount of IP traffic estimated from 1984 at the dawn of the Internet through the end of 2012 was 1.2 Zettabytes. "Even we have to take a step back and be astonished at the volume of traffic," Cisco VNI senior analyst Arielle Sumits said. By 2016, Cisco expects there to be 3.4 billion Internet users -- about 45% of the world's projected population, according to United Nations estimates. The average fixed broadband speed is expected to increase nearly fourfold, from 9 Megabits per second in 2011 to 34 Mbps in 2016. And video is the biggest chunk out of the overall rapidly expanding pie.