Worldwide Internet traffic will quadruple by 2015 with nearly 15bn fixed, mobile and machine-to-machine connections fuelling the growth.

According to Cisco’s fifth annual Virtual Networking Index report, there will be nearly 3bn Internet users in four years from now — more than 40% of the world’s projected population — generating annual global Internet Protocol (IP) traffic of 966 exabytes, or nearly a zettabyte, of traffic. Video will fuel much of the growth, with more than 1m minutes of video traversing the Internet every second.

Cisco predicts SA mobile data traffic will grow three times faster than fixed-line traffic between 2010 to 2015, with mobile contributing 37 petabytes a month (up from 424TB/month in 2010).

SA traffic projections look like this:

IP traffic will grow sevenfold from 2010 to 2015, a compound annual growth rate of 46%.
IP networks will carry nine petabytes a day in 2015.
SA’s IP traffic in 2015 will be equivalent to streaming 812m DVD movies a year, 68m DVD movies per month, or 92 640 DVD movies an hour.
In 2015, the gigabyte equivalent of all movies ever made will cross SA IP networks every 22 hours.
IP traffic will reach 5GB per person in 2015, up from 1GB in 2010.

SA’s average broadband speed is expected to grow from 1,9Mbit/s to 5Mbit/s by 2015, with 15% of broadband connections expected to be faster than 5Mbit/s in 2015, up from 11% today. The biggest gains are expected in average mobile connection speeds, which Cisco predicts will grow 20-fold from 2010 to 2015, reaching an average 5,5Mbit/s.

Considering that the average SA Internet user is expected to be generating 20GB of Internet traffic per month in 2015 (up 631% from 2,7GB in 2010) and that the average mobile connection is forecast to generate 822MB of mobile data traffic per month (up from 11MB in 2010), broadband speeds may even grow more briskly than the forecasts suggest on the back of consumer demand.

vnigraph — Projected worldwide IP traffic growth

Consumer video is expected to be the primary driver of IP traffic growth worldwide, not only because of an increased number of users and devices, but also due to anticipated increased demand for high-definition and 3D video — both of which are bandwidth intensive.

Reshaad Sha, strategy director at Cisco SA’s Internet business solutions group, says the report is based on real data from service providers. “We extrapolate out from existing figures, so if operators continue to invest in capacity as they have in recent years then we expect them to keep abreast of demand.”

Sha says that one of the most interesting findings to come out of the report is that, for the first time, North American IP traffic growth is going to be surpassed by that of the Asia-Pacific region. “Asia-Pacific is seeing more and more of its population getting online. Previously, limited access meant that the region generated less traffic than North America despite having a far larger population.”

In SA, Sha says the biggest contributor to traffic growth will be mobile. “All of the big growth rates are coming from mobile, both locally and globally.”

He says that by the end of 2011, half of all IP traffic in SA will be video. — Craig Wilson, TechCentral