Cisco's latest annual Visual Networking Index (VNI) report reveals SA is in for continued and substantial growth due to what the networking giant dubs "South Africans' thirst for data and Internet services".
Leon Wright, CTO of Cisco SA, says the latest forecast showcases "the seemingly insatiable demand for bandwidth in SA" as predictions show that by 2017, SA's IP traffic will have quadrupled - to the equivalent of two billion DVDs per year.
Cisco's updated study includes fixed IP traffic growth and service adoption trends, complementing the VNI Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast, released earlier this year.
Here are some of the key findings revealed in the latest forecast (1-6 for SA; 7-10 globally), which takes a detailed look into IP traffic drivers such as devices, connections, increased use of video services and applications, and faster fixed broadband network speeds:
1. The average fixed broadband speed in SA will have increased 2.3-fold by 2017, from 2.5Mbps (in 2012) to 6Mbps.
2. SA's IP traffic (fixed and mobile) is expected to reach an annual run rate of 6.1 exabytes - almost 6.55 billion gigabytes per year - by 2017. This is equivalent to two billion DVDs a year; 128 million DVDs a month; or 174 939 DVDs an hour.
3. By 2017, there will be over 133 million network connections in SA - including fixed and mobile personal devices and machine-to-machine (M2M) connections.
4. Thirty-eight billion minutes (72 436 years) of video content will cross the Internet each month in SA by 2017. That is 14 487 minutes of video streamed or downloaded every second.
5. By 2017, the non-PC share of Internet traffic will grow to 20%.
6. The Middle East and Africa will continue to be the fastest growing IP traffic region until 2017 - with five-fold growth or 38% compound annual growth rate over the forecast period.
7. Nearly half of the world's population will have network and Internet access by 2017.
8. The average Internet household will generate 74.5GB per month, whereas the average household generated 31.6GB of traffic per month last year.
9. The "Internet of Things" will lead to global M2M IP traffic growing 20-fold over the same period - from 197 petabytes (0.5% of global IP traffic) in 2012 - to 3.9 exabytes (3% of global IP traffic) in 2017.
10. Drivers of the said global growth include applications like video surveillance, smart meters, asset tracking, chipped pets and livestock, and digital health monitors.
Forecast methodology
Cisco's VNI forecast methodology is based on a combination of analyst projections, in-house estimates and forecasts, and direct data collection.
The analyst projections for broadband connections, video subscribers, mobile connections, and Internet application adoption come from SNL Kagan, Ovum, Informa Telecoms & Media, Infonetics, IDC, Gartner, AMI, Arbitron Mobile, Ookla Speedtest.net, Strategy Analytics, Screen Digest, Dell'Oro Group, Synergy, comScore, Nielsen, and others.
Upon this foundation are layered Cisco's own estimates for application adoption, minutes of use, and kilobytes per minute. The adoption, usage, and bitrate assumptions are tied to fundamental enablers such as broadband speed and computing speed. All usage and traffic results are then validated using data shared with Cisco from service providers.
Share
