According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index™ Global Forecast and Service Adoption for 2014 to 2019, global Internet Protocol (IP) traffic has increased 500% over the past five years, and will increase nearly 300% over the next five years due to more Internet users and devices, faster broadband speeds and more video viewing. According to the same Cisco report, Internet video to TV doubled in 2014.


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The report, which says global video traffic will be 80 percent of all consumer Internet traffic in 2019, up from 64 percent in 2014.  The Cisco report examines the impact and growth of global IP traffic based on the company's position as a leading telecommunications provider with the ability to track and forecast demand for bandwidth.  These are the major findings in the latest report:

• Annual global IP traffic will pass the zettabyte (1000 exabytes) threshold by the end of 2016, and will reach 2 zettabytes per year by 2019. By 2016, global IP traffic will reach 1.1 zettabytes per year, or 88.4 exabytes (nearly one billion gigabytes) per month, and by 2019, global IP traffic will reach 2.0 zettabytes per year, or 168 exabytes per month.
• Global IP traffic has increased fivefold over the past five years, and will increase threefold over the next five years. Overall, IP traffic will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23 percent from 2014 to 2019.

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• Busy-hour Internet traffic is growing more rapidly than average Internet traffic. Busy-hour (or the busiest 60-minute period in a day) Internet traffic increased 37 percent in 2014, compared with 29 percent growth in average traffic.
• Metro traffic surpassed long-haul traffic in 2014, and will account for 66 percent of total IP traffic by 2019. Metro traffic will grow more than twice as fast as long-haul traffic from 2014 to 2019. The higher growth in metro networks is due in part to the increasingly significant role of content delivery networks (CDNs), which bypass long-haul links and deliver traffic to metro and regional backbones.

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• Two-thirds of all IP traffic will originate with non-PC devices by 2019. In 2014, only 40 percent of total IP traffic originated with non-PC devices, but by 2019 the non-PC share of total IP traffic will grow to 67 percent. PC-originated traffic will grow at a CAGR of 9 percent, and TVs, tablets, smartphones, and machine-to-machine (M2M) modules will have traffic growth rates of 17 percent, 65 percent, 62 percent, and 71 percent respectively.
• Traffic from wireless and mobile devices will exceed traffic from wired devices by 2016. By 2016, wired devices will account for 47 percent of IP traffic, and Wi-Fi and mobile devices will account for 53 percent of IP traffic. In 2014, wired devices accounted for the majority of IP traffic, at 54 percent.
• Global Internet traffic in 2019 will be equivalent to 66 times the volume of the entire global Internet in 2005. Globally, Internet traffic will reach 37 gigabytes (GB) per capita by 2019, up from 15.5 GB per capita in 2014.
• The number of devices connected to IP networks will be more than three times the global population by 2019. There will be more than three networked devices per capita by 2019, up from nearly two networked devices per capita in 2014. Accelerated in part by the increase in devices and the capabilities of those devices, IP traffic per capita will reach 22 GB per capita by 2019, up from 8 GB per capita in 2014.
• Broadband speeds will more than double by 2019. By 2019, global fixed broadband speeds will reach 42.5 Mbps, up from 20.3 Mbps in 2014.

To put the rate of growth of global Internet traffic in perspective, Cisco says 100 GB of data per day traveled over the Internet.  In 2019, this is expected to rise to almost 52 GBps (gigabits per second). 

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The report also says the Internet of Everything is gaining momentum, with nearly as many machine-to-machine connections as there are people on earth.

Cisco's definition of the Internet of Everything is "bringing together people, process, data, and things to make networked connections more relevant and valuable than ever before-turning information into actions that create new capabilities, richer experiences, and unprecedented economic opportunity for businesses, individuals, and countries."