2010-2015 Networking Forecast

Cisco has published a network traffic forecast that warrants attention because it projects an enormous increase in network traffic. http://www.cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns827/networking_solutions_sub_solution.html

Organizations have to start planning for increased capacity for handling transactions to exceed volumes that have been experienced so far.

1.                Global IP traffic will be growing at an annual rate (CAGR) of 32% with the greatest growth in the Asia Pacific and Latin American countries.

2.                There will be two network IP devices per person by 2015 as compared with only one network IP device per person in 2015.

3.                By 2015 fifteen percent of all network traffic will originate from devices other than personal computers. Machine-to-machine communications will have a growth rate of 258% CAGR, mostly coming from Radio Frequency Identification sources.

4.                Traffic from wireless sources (Wi-Fi plus mobile devices) will exceed traffic from wired devices by 2015. Business mobile traffic will grow at 84% CAGR as compared with only 19% FAGR for traffic on wired devices.

5.                Traffic will be unevenly distributed. There will be at least 20 million locations that will be consuming over six terabytes of traffic per year by 2015.

6.                Peak load traffic will increase faster than average traffic. By 2015 there will be 500 million people that can be expected to use global networks simultaneously.

SUMMARY

The unprecedented rise in computer-based communications will require an enormous expansion in the capacity of circuits. It will also call for a decisive shift to the IPv6 protocol to accommodate a large number of sites in the Asia/Pacific geography.

“Last mile” wired communication links will be unable to keep up with rapidly rising demands for circuits and therefore there will be a shift from landlines to wireless connectivity. Latin America and the Asia/Pacific countries will leap-frog directly from wired to wireless methods while simultaneously also adopting the most advanced form of cloud computing.

The key bottleneck will be in the availability of application software. Countries with a rapid expansion in the number of computer users will migrate directly to software-as-a-service solutions.

Most people will own both a wired as well as a wireless device.

The explosive growth of machine-to-machine communications will see the beginning of a trend from viewing Internet as a people-to-people medium to things-to-people connectivity.

Peak load concentration of traffic will dictate the creation of global transaction processing centers so that the workload can be distributed across several time zones. The distribution of the workload will be also dictated by the requirement for redundancy in transaction processing in order to assure high availability of services.

The emerging trends in growth and in the structure of information processing will require a redesign of computing facilities. There is no question that the adoption of cloud computing will be leading future developments, at a rapid pace.