Cisco announced the results of its annual Visual Networking Index Forecast, 2009-2014, which projects that global Internet traffic will increase more than fourfold to 767 exabytes (EB) – or 767 million terabytes – by 2014.

The growth will continue to be dominated by video – TV, VoD, Internet video, and peer-to-peer – exceeding 91% of global consumer IP traffic. The nearly 64 exabytes of global IP traffic per month projected for 2014 is equivalent to 16 billion DVDs, 21 trillion MP3s, or 399 quadrillion text messages.

Global Internet video traffic will surpass global peer-to-peer traffic by the end of 2010 at which time the global online video community will include more than 1 billion users.

By 2014, it would take more than two years to watch the amount of video that will cross global IP networks every second; to watch all the video crossing the network that year would take 72 million years.

High definition television and 3D is projected to increase 13 times between 2009 and 2014. By 2014, 3D is expected to account for 4% of total Internet video traffic. And 3D and HD video is forecast to account for 42% of total consumer Internet video traffic.

By 2014, consumer IP traffic – web surfing, instant messaging, user-generated videos, etc. – will represent 87% of monthly total global IP traffic; while business IP traffic – email, voice, Internet, HD and web-based video conferencing, etc. – will represent 13% of monthly total global IP traffic.

By 2014, the highest IP-traffic generating regions will be North America (19 EB/month), Asia Pacific (17.4 EB/month), Western Europe (16.2 EB/month) and Japan (4.3 EB/month).

In just a decade, the average global residential Internet connection download speed has increased 35 times, which has helped to dramatically increase Internet usage. In 2000, the average global residential Internet connection download speed was 127Kb/s). This year, the figure is 4.4Mb/s).

Story filed 06.06.10