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IP Traffic To 'Double' Every Two Years
Stony Stevenson writes "Web traffic volumes will almost double every two years from 2007 to 2012, driven by video and web 2.0 applications, according to a report from Cisco Systems. Cisco's Visual Networking Index (PDF) predicts that visual networking will account for 90 percent of the traffic coursing through the world's IP networks by 2012. The upward trend is not only driven by consumer demand for YouTube clips and IPTV, according to the report, as business use of video conferencing will grow at 35 percent CAGR over the same period." I left the apostrophes around the word "double" in the title because the linked site has them, but for the life of me I can't figure out why.
How do they even define what a double of IP traffic is? Double the amount of packets? Double the amount of connections? Double the amount of IP's used in traversal from one point to another?
I really thought traffic would level off, and maybe even drop over the next several years. The Internet is a fad. I would never tell it that, but it won't last.
Hmmm, a huge supplier of networking gear is saying that network will continue to grow...This article is making me want to buy a lot of networking gear to get ahead of the impending doubling. I wonder if that's the intent? Nah, couldn't be.
Sheldon
No news here... yes, Internet traffic doubles over a relatively short period of time..
The biggest challenge going forward is how we are possibly going to power all of this traffic. Electrical power costs are going to be raising 10-20% a year for the next little while. What we need to engineer is using the bandwidth more efficiently.
I never thought I would say this, but Television still beats the Internet for delivering video content. As for video conferencing, it is cheaper to video conference than to fly, but again, the telephone conference call over POTS still delivers ALOT of bandwidth very efficiently. Not that I am a fan of the Telcos, I am a fan of the POTS, its a very mature infrastructure that delivers very high value.
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To combat the increase of traffic why cant businesses/ISP's work more towards multicasting? for at least some part of the webs streaming sources (internet radio.. etc) this would alleviate some of the load surely..
Network Scientists have discovered that the majority of the bandwidth in the Internet is "dark fiber", a mysterious substance that has the same gravitational effects on backhoes as normal fiber, but does not interact with the internet as a whole. Some believe is possible to harness this bandwidth through dark packets, but others fear the growth of pink packets (typically containing porn and spam) will eliminate any potential gains from this little-understood phenomenon. Other scientists, primarily at ISPs, believe that extracting dark money from end users through traffic surcharges is the only way to take advantage of dark fiber.
Will network infrastructure meet this doubling demand? Or is net traffic going to get stuck due to a series-of-tubes shortage?
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.... router company tells shareholders.
Web traffic volumes will almost double every two years from 2007 to 2012
But ONLY until Dec 31, 2011 when it will immediately stop doubling.
There, got that out of the way.
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And what shape would that graph have? Would it be a double-bell-curve shape or a compressed single-bell-curve shape?
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This is just the generalization of Moore's Law, caused by the standardized technology curve where costs fall to zero.
I call this the "half-life rule" of technology, where the half-life is usually about 18 months: the cost of any technology will halve every 18 months. What remains in the end is raw materials, shipping, marketing.
Since the cost of the Internet is falling constantly, its per-dollar capacity is doubling every 18 months.
A corollary: Wikipedia's budget is 60% spent on hardware, and this sum is constant over the years, yet Wikipedia's content doubles every... 18 months or so. Moore's Law working in both directions, so we have more or less infinite expansion at a constant cost.
Obviously the expansion is not infinite, because costs do not actually fall to zero and at a certain stage marketing, shipping, and usage costs outweigh production and account for 99.999% of the final cost.
But still, this is hardly news unless people are shocked to learn that technology gets cheaper over time.
While I'm ranting about people being surprised at the obvious, note that we can predict the cost of technology in the future, quite accurately, by applying the half-life rule to the production costs any given product, subtracting the fixed costs.
So for example I can predict that cell phones will be disposable (costing under $10) within four years.
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Actually the apostrophes from TFA are an example of good standard journalistic practice. A news publication should never make a claim in a headline without some indication (the quotes) that it came from a source outside that publication. In this case, a report from Cisco. This is just one of many small textual differences between pubs with good journalistic integrity and those with not so much.
I'll believe it when I get my flying car...
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With 10Gb circuits increasing in popularity and replacing OC48's, we're probably still in good shape, until 2012. Perhaps, by then the Cisco CRS-1 won't seem so overpriced. In the meantime, everyone can buy Juniper :)
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35% growth in video conferencing annually? Maybe, but the technology still has leaps and bounds to go. After attending a recent all-day meeting via video conferencing, I realized that:
1. You still can't make out expressions that well.
2. The software that is supposed to auto-focus the camera on people doesn't work very well at all, focusing on quiet side bar conversations all too often.
3. People were staring at their computers and blackberrys the entire time because very few people were actually in the same room.
Maybe we'll have 35% growth given the high price of travel these days, but the technology needs some help.
This is a very common headlining technique in non-USA journalism. The Australian news service is not drawing the conclusion that traffic will double. The news service is quoting a report from Cisco. As such, the headline can be ready as "IP Traffic Said to Double Every Two Years." The use of quotes instead of the omitted words is a space-saving technique, much like using a comma instead of the word and in "CmdrTaco Confused, Disoriented by Quotes."
This isn't flamebait, but perhaps it is a flame. For the life of me, I can't see how an editor of a news-aggregating service can serve in that capacity for a decade and not pick up on these kinds of things. Even if you wish to disavow being a journalist or an editor, you might perhaps learn a thing or two from them.
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...says that the amount of data coming out of an optical fiber is doubling every nine months. So every time traffic doubles, capacity pentuples.
Granted, there's still the last-mile problem, deploying the technology, etc. But I wouldn't predict the collapse of the internet any time soon.