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.
'double' (Score:4, Insightful)
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What's the average in centibytes per fortnight? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:What's the average in centibytes per fortnight? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:'double' (Score:5, Insightful)
1) video, especially HDTV, is being delivered by cable systems out-of-band of the Internet because of its high data rate. This trend will continue, else cable companies will have to evolve (and rapidly) immensely fast infrastructure that must also match CPE. Unlikely to occur. However, DSL providers are faced with a similar problem. What this means is that HDTV will be switched at the head-end eventually, and not 100% available to CPE. Video on Demand will become the rule of the day, thus offsetting some of the perceived growth in Cisco's numbers
2) business video conferencing, even in the face of $4 or $8/gal costs, just hasn't taken off. Codecs are available that can do a very good job of offsetting bandwidth needs.
3) isochronous media is still a bear, but it simply needs priority and priority in the face of network neutrality calls will be difficult without increasing bandwidth and therefore asset costs, which pays/plays into Cisco's hands mightily (are you watching, Wall Street?).
4) Cellular/mobile growth will climb, but it's more linear in growth and devices that receive entertainment content that uses bandwidth are largely distributed on private, rather than the public Interent. You just can't make a mobile phone in to an HDTV no matter how much you try, and the demand for it isn't there despite the best hopes of the telcos.
5) regionalization of content distribution is already occuring, and so a distributed infrastructure will 'cellularize' a lot of transfers. Transasction-focused systems aren't well managed through regionalization, but because entertainment systems aren't usually transaction-based, the use case is largely moot.
Doubling is therefore a projection based on a lot of assumptions, mostly favoring the maker of the study.
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Re:'double' (Score:5, Funny)
want to help me with my math homework?
Re:'double' (Score:4, Funny)
Re:'double' (Score:5, Funny)
For long term proposals, you'd need to do inflation-adjusted Libraries of Congress.
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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.
Well, using terms such as "approximately" or "roughly" is certainly more applicable than quotes, which are akward when used to indicated uncertainty in a quantity.
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Twice the volume of 2010 is 4020...
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http://t2.unl.edu/phedex/xml/quantity_cumulative?link=dest&span=86400&starttime=time.time()-30*86400 [unl.edu]
Total is 3.7PB over the last month. I doubt that one science experiment accounts for 40% of global IP traffic in Cisco's estimates.
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So, to paraphrase the article title: Amount of money spent on Cisco products to 'Double' every two years.
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Duh (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Duh (Score:5, Funny)
I'll show all you doubters, and then Janine will take me back.
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I about ten years ago I told some friends that in the near future we will no longer have a phone line and cable TV but instead a data port. Eventually we will have enough band width.
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Yeah because a real-time 3D virtual world interface run over our data pipes won't ever emerge or become standard; Or virtual machines usable from any terminal that move location in the grid; Or any other of a hundred things my little lizard brain can't conceive of yet.
How can people continuously make the statement that at point x we'll have enough that we'll stop expanding our data/memory/network capacity? How many times do we
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If you doubled the amount of IP traffic every year for 32 years you would end up with over four billion times the traffice we have now. At 33 years it would be around eight billion....
Yes every technology reaches a state of maturity in at least area of performance.
Ships today are not significantly faster than ships from the 1950s. There are just more of them that can approach the top speeds of the best of th
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Intellectual Property to double? Cool! (Score:1)
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Self serving? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sheldon
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I can definitely believe it, over the past year my ISP has been implementing very restrictive banwidth caps.
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Or that it will double, but they should not be the ones to tell us this?
It is not like they are picking the number out of the air, they have some good basis for this guess. Just because they benefit from it, doesn't make it less true, more worthy of some independent fact-cbecking, yes, but not less true.
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HEY! The winds really picked up outside! What's with all the wate....*&(*&()&*)&))&)&
(*&E
NO CARRIER
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So buy buy buy more Cisco Router!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
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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Having said that I must admit that this all does not matter if the mass (including customers as well as agents of evil in boards of directors of major companies in the industry) will decide that from
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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 f
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If you are going to multiply the time by the people in the swarm then you have to remember two things: it gets faster with more people and when you compare to broadcast you have to make a fair comparison of the bandwidth involved. The people in the swarm are making poin
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Take advantage of IP Multicasting (Score:3, Insightful)
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Because there is no viable billing model for multicast IP traffic as of yet. How do you charge for traffic created/amplified by routers? ISP A has to trust that ISP B isn't lying about the amount of traffic actually delivered to end users, becuase ISP A has no visibility once a multicast packet leaves their network and enters that of ISP B.
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If so, I'd wait another 5 or 10 years, because ipv6 adoption (like many things humans do) is going to be slow until it's urgent.
No Link to PDF (Score:1, Informative)
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In summary (Score:1, Funny)
Dark Fiber (Score:5, Funny)
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But, Doctor Evil, that already happened!"
paging Albert Bartlett (Score:1)
Demand doubling...What about the supply? (Score:2, Funny)
the apostrophes around the word 'double' (Score:2)
Is there a correlation?? (Score:1)
A graph? (Score:2, Funny)
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"Everyone's going to buy lots more routers..." (Score:4, Insightful)
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fixed a typo (Score:1)
Quotes... (Score:2)
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Or is it because they are quoting just the "double" part of Cisco's report?
Seems like unwarranted accuracy to me for predicting events 2 years hence. Also seems like an underestimate too.
IP Television - a prankster's dream (Score:1)
Can you imagine hearing
"Mommy, why did Sesame Street turn off?"
just because someone flipped the bit and make it TV-M?
Or worse, some blackmailer replaces the Superbowl with infomercials for the last two minutes.
Time range (Score:5, Interesting)
But ONLY until Dec 31, 2011 when it will immediately stop doubling.
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--J
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I didn't get the memo (Score:1)
Need the 'info' (Score:1)
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.
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1. the Hop-On 1800 lowers costs by removing basic functionality such as a display. I'm assuming the costs will fall for an equivalent product, i.e. what would be a basic cheap cell phone today.
2. You cannot actually buy the Hop-On 1800 anywhere, this is still vapourware. Will it be available for $10 any time soon? Remember the EEE PC, promised at $200 and currently at about $350-$600.
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> be disposable (costing under $10) within four years.
For a particular subset of cell phone (those over 3 years old) that has been the case for years. Hence the iPhone, a computer with a teeny display and attached cell phone, to try to avoid this fate.
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I know this is meant to be somewhat tongue in cheek, the cost of the Internet is _not_ falling. It may have been true, but the steeply rising costs of data centers and Internet technologies in general due to rising electrical costs and future shortages will start to be felt and the "cost of the Internet" will rise dramatically when measured in gross dollars spent.
Quotes (Score:2)
c.f. "Lay-zer" [op-for.com].
Related baffled query: When did "lead" become an acceptable substitute for "led"? As in, "She led me down the path of insanity, and I merrily followed."
--J
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Despite what others have written, it's not sarcasm, and it's certainly not because the headline writer doubted the correctness or consistency of the source being cited.
What you see are simple quotation marks, used to indicate the exact word or phrase from the news source is being repeated in its citation.
I'm a bit concerned to find that so few
-David.
Moore's Law works for technology. (Score:2, Interesting)
betterstartupgrading (Score:1)
as opposed to Non-IP traffic.... (Score:1)
Non-IP traffic had this to say on the subject:
"Why does that IP traffic have to be taking up all the bandwdidth all the time.. like it's sooooo important..."
IP traffic could not be reached for comment at this time...
Doing the math (Score:2)
I don't think this is quite right... it's usually about three years between Firefox releases, not two.
Oh no! (Score:2)
I have the 'solution'... (Score:2)
You all need to stop using stupid stuff.
There, fixed THAT for ya.
Video conferencing schmideo conferencing (Score:2, Interesting)
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 sam
It's not fair, I demand throttling (Score:2)
I take it this'll account for a major percentage of bandwidth being used up, I don't think that's fair to us little guys who only use our internet for VOIP, not fancy video conferencing. There are far more residential customers than there are businesses. Why should my internet by affected by these guys wanting video communication? Especially when the poor ISP's networks aren't built to handle it. It's not fair. They s
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.
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First parsed as "news-aggravating service". Seems about right.
In the US, it is far more common to see people use quote's, in an attempt to 'incorrectly' emphasize words. Its 'nearly' as common, as people who think two comma's, are better than one, or who think apostrophe's can just be shoved in, 'anywhere'.
Butters' Law of Photonics (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Umm... (Score:1)
-Cisco
They're SO not trying to cause a stir and get people in the mindset of upgrading network infrastructure at least every two years.
Clash of the Titans (Score:2)
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/02/going-medieval-time-warner-begins-metered-bandwidth-testing/#comments/ [techcrunch.com]
AT&T and Comcast have both indicated that they will soon start metering bandwidth as well.
Who's going to win? Cisco or Time Warner? Bandwidth won't be doubling if the ISP providers start limiting users to 40GB/month and charging $1/GB overage. All the companies like Youtube and Netflix providing streaming video will see traffic drop to Nil if Mom & Dad ha
It's youtube's fault alright (Score:2)
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But you are right, just download TFV and be done with it. Youtube and on demand video (over the internet) we
No, it will start to drop (Score:2)
Here we go again!! (Score:2)
But traffic was only increasing by 50%/year. The equipment sat idle. Shops closed up and dumped the hardware they bought with VC money on the market at firesale prices. Hardware ve
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