Bandwidth Demand Slows but Continues to Grow

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The latest Cisco data shows continued demand for bandwidth, but it's not growing at the same rapid rate it once did. This may change, as video is moving to displace P2P file sharing as the most common type of traffic. Enterprise Networking Planet explores this recent trend.

Internet traffic growth will continue to rise over the next five years, hitting a whopping 767 exabytes by 2014, according to the latest Visual Networking Index (VNI) forecast from Cisco. While that total is staggering, that's still slower than previous growth predictions.

The company is now forecasting that Internet traffic growth will grow fourfold between 2009 and 2014. However, Cisco's estimate in 2009 had previously predicted 500-percent global Internet traffic growth between 2008 and 2013.

"Percentage-wise, yes, the growth rate is tapering off a bit, though the volume increases continue to be impressive," Doug Webster, senior director of service provider marketing at Cisco, told InternetNews.com. "The delta between 2013 and 2014, for instance, will be larger than total IP traffic in 2008. That said, it is entirely possible that the growth rate will hold steady rather than tapering, since our methodology is conservative in nature. Some of the wildcards that could bolster the growth rate in coming years are: Streaming gaming (e.g. OnLive, Playcast, etc.), Live TV via Internet, HD video communications, and 3DTV."

Read "Global Networking Bandwidth Demand Starts to Slow" at Enterprise Networking Planet