IP Traffic To 'Double' Every Two Years 128
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.
No Link to PDF (Score:1, Informative)
Re:'double' (Score:5, Informative)
Said the parent post:
They predicted the amount of traffic in petabytes per month.
Said the original post:
TFA contains a link to Cisco's Visual Networking Index (PDF) [cisco.com]
Look on page 3 of that PDF, where there is "Table 1. Global IP Traffic 2006-2012".
A quick scan of the values do show a doubling of volume looking 2 years out from any given year... but there are exceptions to that. The comparison of traffic from 2010 to 2012 mostly does not show a doubling, AND, in a couple places, the data comparing 2009 to 2011 does not double, either.
Lastly, the final row of that table predicts "Total IP traffic (PB per month)":
Twice the volume of 2010, i.e. 24,228 would be 48,456 which is less than 43,518. So, though not quite doubled in one case listed there, to say that it would double every two years would be incorrect. And we'd be all over that if they had claimed it to be. IMHO, to say 'double' is a reasonable way to express this concept.
And in more news, apples fall to the ground (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Quotes (Score:3, Informative)
Re:So buy buy buy more Cisco Router!!! (Score:3, Informative)
You've got to be friggin' kidding me. Analog TV is wasting huge amounts of bandwidth
I didn't say a more efficient use of bandwidth, I said more efficient at delivering video, full stop. You can't compare what you _could_ do with what people _are_ doing. Let me give you some comparisons of existing technology.
1: Bit torrent delivery of television quality 2h movie: Time 4-8 hours on average. 650-900 MB of DISK SPACE and bandwidth. Multiply this by the 400 people who download this, it is allot of time for allot of bandwidth.
2. Youtube.com 2h tv quality video: You can't do it, its not available. Even if you could, it would still take hours to download, and then you could watch it on your puny laptop screen. Don't even get me started on hooking up most PCs to the TV (Macs shine at this, BTW).
3. Aerial broadcast of 2h movie. Time: 2h. Bandwidth used: SHARED usage for 400-100,000 people. Damn efficient use of bandwidth and resources. Even if its not on-demand.
4. Satellite broadcast: 500 channels from one satellite. SHARED usage for 1,000,000 - 24,000,000 million people. Damn efficient use of available bandwidth and resources.
As far as I know, there is no-one with a large user base using the Internet for TV quality video. Never mind HD video quality that I get from my satellite today! This does not take into account the HUGE power requirements of data centers, routers, and the rest of the Internet Infrastructure. Broadcast TV and Satellite TV are great uses of bandwidth AND resources compared to other technologies.
People have been promising multicast TV over IP for a long long time. I remember early 90s efforts that just failed because the REAL bandwidth and computing resources were just too high.
for the life of me (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:'double' (Score:1, Informative)