In 2020, four years from now, Internet traffic in Africa and the Middle East will be equivalent to 527 times the volume of the entire Internet in the region in 2005.

This is one of the startling findings in the latest edition of the Cisco Visual Networking Index, for the period 2015 to 2020.

The report has found that African Internet protocol (IP) traffic will grow six-fold between now and 2020. The continent will undergo the most rapid Internet traffic growth worldwide in that period.

In the same period, fixed broadband speeds in Africa will increase 2,4-fold, with an average mobile speed connection of 5Mbit/s.

“Increased connectivity and Internet usage will positively impact South Africa’s digital migration journey,” Cisco said.

The company expects that the worldwide adoption of personal devices and deployment of machine-to-machine (M2M) connections will have an enormous impact on traffic growth in the next few years.

Over the next five years, global IP networks will support up to 10bn new devices and connections, increasing from 16,3bn in 2015 to 26,3bn by 2020. In Africa, there will be approximately 1,5 networked devices per capita in 2020, 77% of which will be mobile-connected.

“Applications such as video surveillance, smart meters, digital health monitors and a host of other M2M services are creating new network requirements and incremental traffic increases,” the report said.

“Globally, M2M connections are calculated to grow nearly three-fold from 4,9bn in 2015 to 12,2bn by 2020, representing 46% of total connected devices. In Africa, M2M modules will account for 22% of all networked devices by 2020.”

Video services and content continue to be the dominant leader compared with all other applications. Internet video will account for 79% of global Internet traffic by 2020, up from 63% in 2015.

The world will reach three trillion Internet video minutes per month by 2020, which is five million years of video per month, or about one million video minutes every second. High-definition and ultra-high-definition Internet video will make up 82% of Internet video traffic by 2020, up from 53% in 2015.

Other key findings of the report include:

Worldwide mobile data traffic will grow 15-fold from 2015 to 2020, a compound annual growth rate of 71%, meaning two times faster growth than fixed IP traffic.
Mobile was 15% of total IP traffic in 2015, and will be 40% of total IP traffic in 2020.
IP video traffic will grow eight-fold from 2015 to 2020, a compound annual growth rate of 50%.
Internet gaming traffic will grow eight-fold and will be 2% of consumer Internet traffic in 2020.
M2M modules will account for 22% of all networked devices by 2020.
By 2020, it is expected that 21% of IP traffic will be generated by PCs (67% in 2015), 4% by TVs, 60% by smartphones (up from 20% in 2015), 12% by tablets and 2,4% by M2M modules.
Average fixed broadband speed will grow 2,4 -fold from 2015 to 2020, from 7Mbit/s to 16,5Mbit/s. Average mobile connection speed will grow six-fold and will reach 5Mbit/s by 2020. — (c) 2016 NewsCentral Media