Digitization over the next five years will continue to have a major impact on the demands and requirements of IP networks. Global IP traffic will increase threefold by 2021, reaching 3.3 Zettabytes per year, with a year-on-year growth rate of 24%. This is according to the 12th annual CiscoVisual Networking Index (VNI) Global Forecast and Service Adoption 2016-2021.
The main drivers of this evolution, according to Cisco, are:
- More Internet users.- In 2021 there will be 4.6 billion Internet users, 58% of the 7.8 billion inhabitants that, according to the UN, will make up the expected world population, while in 2016 this figure stood at 3.3 billion, 44% of the world population.
- More connected devices.- By 2021 there will be 27.1 billion connected devices, three for every person on the planet, up from 17.1 billion in 2016, representing two devices per capita, including machine-to-machine (M2M) connections.
- Increase in M2M connections.- M2M connections will represent more than half of the total on a global scale and will generate 5% of total IP traffic by 2021. Advances in the Internet of Things (IoT) such as the connected home, connected transport, smart vehicles and other next-generation M2M services are driving this exponential growth, increasing almost 2.4 times from 5.8 billion in 2016 to a projected 13.7 billion by 2021. Connected transport and connected city applications, with an expected year-on-year increase of 29% each, will be among the fastest growing, behind only the healthcare segment (30%).
- Increasing video traffic.- Video will continue to dominate IP traffic, accounting for 82% in 2021, up from 73% in 2016. Globally there will be nearly 1.9 billion internet video users (excluding mobile-only), up from 1.4 billion in 2016. By 2021, three trillion monthly minutes of video will be consumed on the internet globally, which is five million video years per month or one million minutes of video every second.
Live video on the internet will increase 15-fold to 13% of video traffic on the internet by 2021 (80% of total traffic), which means more use of streaming TV applications and personal videos on social networks. Although live streaming video will represent the largest traffic in the entertainment segment, virtual reality and augmented reality are also growing at a good pace, multiplying by 20 times by 2021 and accounting for 1% of entertainment traffic.
- Faster broadband speeds.- Globally, the average fixed broadband speed will almost double between 2016 and 2021, from 27.5 Mbps to 53 Mbps. In Spain it will increase from 38 to 65 Mbps.
- Increased mobility.- Mobile phones and devices with Wi-Fi will go from generating 62% of IP traffic to 73% in 2021, while in Spain the evolution will be from 67% to 77%. Likewise, the number of public wifi connection points, including those in homes, will increase sixfold on a global scale, from 94 to 541.6 million. China (170 million), the United States (86 million), Japan (33 million) and France (30 million) will be the countries with the largest number of connection points.
- Increase in Distributed Denial of Service(DDoS) attacks , which can cripple networks by flooding servers and network devices with traffic from multiple IP sources. This type of attack grew 172% in 2016 and will increase 2.5-fold to 3.1 million by 2021 on a global scale. The average size of these attacks has increased by 22%, enough to take most organizations completely offline, and when they occur they can account for up to 18% of a country's total internet traffic.
As Yvette Kanouff, senior vice president and general manager of the Service Provider division at Cisco, said, "As digital transformation continues to affect billions of consumers and businesses around the world, the network and security will be essential to securing the future of the Internet. It is critical for Cisco and service providers to continue to drive network innovation to provide users with scalable, secure, and quality connected experiences.
Check out the infographic with the most representative data of the report:
Infographic from Cisco's Visual Networking Index (VNI) report.
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