According to Cisco Systems, Web traffic volumes will double every two years from 2007 to 2012, driven by video and web 2.0 applications.
Increased use of video and file sharing that social networking websiets like Loconut and Facebook has created, what Cisco calls ‘visual networking’, is contributing to traffic volumes at a compound annual growth rate of 46 per cent.
There’s also an exploding market in TV On-Demand, such as Apple’s AppleTV. With the first Mac store opening up in Australia last week, Australia looks set to get the kind of content avaialble to U.S. & U.K. users of AppleTV. With each episode of High Def video content weighing in at several gigabytes at the very least, this new rising demand for internet traffic will continue to grow.
Cisco predicts that visual networking will account for around 90 per cent of all internet traffic by 2012. They also say that a new form of data measurement called exabytes (one billion gigabytes) will be used to guage traffic, and that by 2012, the world will be using 552 exabytes.
Soon after 2012 we will have to adopt zettabytes (one thousand billion gigabytes) to express traffic volumes – after that we’ll need to start inventing less funny sounding names.
