The Convergence of Data Rate & Component Technologies on Network Growth

It’s no surprise that at the advent of new technologies, projections for bandwidth growth in the networking and computing markets have increased significantly. In fact, in Cisco’s annual Visual Networking Index (VNI), they conclude that residential, business and mobile IP network trends are primarily driven by a combination of video, social networking, and collaboration applications. It is anticipated that annual global IP traffic from these applications will exceed 1.4 zettabytes in 2017 or 120.6 exabytes per month. To put this huge number in perspective, if your coffee cup held the equivalent of 1 gigabyte, 1 zettabyte would equal the volume of the Great Wall of China! The challenge is further magnified in terms of understanding the nature of the data traffic. Data usage is concentrated during a “busy hour”, which is growing faster than average internet traffic. This busy hour traffic is expected to exceed 865 Tbps, which is the equivalent of 720 million people streaming a high-definition video continuously. 

Growth in IP traffic will continue to be catalyzed by increasing numbers of users, connections and speeds along with killer apps, which will drive innovations in network technology, equipment and adoption of cloud, but there are a number of challenges that the industry will need to address.