Cisco Projects a Zzzzzettabyte in 2016

Networking giant Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO, news, filings) issued its sixth annual Visual Networking Index forecast this morning, and as usual the numbers were big. Really big. Zettabyte-big, meaning that the internet will carry 1.3ZB in 2016. But as big as these numbers are, the media does tend to get carried away. 

There is nothing particularly new here as this is just an extension of the prior year’s extrapolations. The 2015 number of 966 exabytes remains in force, with another year of growth tacked on. Just as they projected 2015 monthly traffic to be quadruple that in 2011, they now project that traffic in 2016 will quadruple that of 2012.  Likewise, 2016 will have more connected devices, more internet users, faster broadband, and more video than 2015 did.

Regionally, Asia will still be on top in terms of raw traffic, while the Middle East and Africa will see the fastest growth, followed closely by South America. This also follows current trends.

So while we are inundated with the coming zetaflood, keep in mind that the main message of Cisco’s VNI today is that we remain on pretty much the same course to bandwidth heaven that we have been on for some time now.

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Categories: Internet Traffic