In May, Cisco released the 10th annual Visual Networking Index (VNI) Forecast, and like previous reports it predicts substantial growth in IP traffic globally, as well as here in Canada. Between 2014 and 2019, the annual global IP traffic is expected to triple to a record 2 zettabytes.
In Canada alone, IP traffic will grow 3-fold from 2014 to 2019, a compound annual growth rate of 22%, and will reach 4.1 Exabytes per month in 2019, up from 1.5 Exabytes per month in 2014.
This growth can be attributed to a number of factors, including global increases in Internet users, personal devices and machine-to-machine (M2M) connections, faster broadband speeds, and the adoption of advanced video services.
In Canada, Internet traffic is expected to grow 3.3-fold from 2014 to 2019, a compound annual growth rate of 27%. It’s expected to be 107 Petabytes per day in 2019, up from 30 Petabytes per day in 2014, the equivalent to 10 billion DVDs per year, 810 million DVDs per month, or 1 million DVDs per hour.
To put this into a bit more perspective, the population of Canada is projected at 37 million by 2019. Of that number, 34 million will be online (up from 31 million in 2014), with 382 million networked devices in existence across the country. For reference, there were 185 million networked devices in 2014. That’s a staggering amount of growth.
And in keeping with past reports and the global trend, mobile and video continue to lead the way in Canada as well. Smartphones will account for 7% (27.5 million) of all networked devices in 2019, compared to 11% (20.2 million) in 2014. And total Internet video traffic (business and consumer, combined) in Canada will be 76% of all Internet traffic in 2019, up from 60% in 2014.
But what do these numbers mean? It’s somewhat obvious to say we live in a connected world – we don’t really need a report to tell us that. One merely has to look at the way networked technology is used in our everyday lives, both at work and at home.
The importance of reports like VNI, however, is their ability to help us foresee how technology continues to change and how we can adapt to those changes as a business in order to better serve our customers. We know video and mobility will continue to dominate the way we consume online information, and knowing that we can ensure our partners have all the right tools and services.
And this goes beyond the service provider market. Digitization means that all industries, private and public, will need access to the latest and best technologies in order to fully capitalize on all the potential brought by a connected world.
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