The Zettabyte Era

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Cisco in their latest Visual Networking Index study states that IP traffic will grow at the rate of 46% every year between 2007 and 2012 leading to a bandwidth demand of 0.5 zettabyte per year. All because of the WEB *.0 crowd and the Obamamaniacs .

The very interesting study has some neat stats indeed. The executive summary outlines a number of interesting trends. Not surprisingly Mobile data and Video are the two main trends that are leading the way.

“Mobile data traffic will double each year from now through 2012. Mobile broadband-enabled laptops are creating sharp increases in mobile traffic. In some parts of the world, mobile broadband is becoming a substitute for fixed broadband.”

“Video is now approximately one-quarter of all consumer Internet traffic, not including the amount of video exchanged through P2P file sharing. Internet video grew from 12 percent in 2006 to 22 percent in 2007, and will reach 31 percent by the end of this year.”

That should make Google Youtube people very happy. Recently Nokia has launched an effort to bring WEB to the underprivileged masses of the emerging world via their mobile devices. So there is one explosion about to happen.

The SI-prefix according to Wikipedia ends at YottaByte. At this rate we may be there sooner than we think. Whats after that ? I think the ultimate solution may be for us to become the Ghosts in the machine. Let the data sit wherever it is, but enable our consciousness to travel to the data. But till we can figure out ways of moving the consciouness of 7 billion people through alternate dimensions (once the Hadron Collider gets going again) we have to keep hoping that the likes of CISCO keep pumping out their bigger and bigger routers.

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Tags: Cisco, IP traffic, study, zettabyte