Last week, Juniper announced a 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GE) line card, Nortel announced a new 100G optical trial, and Cisco\'s updated Visual Network Index predicted that global IP traffic will increase five-fold from 2008 to 2013. Yet Ovum\'s 1Q09 service provider switching and routing market share report showed a decline of 23% from 4Q08. What\'s going on‾
We believe that, despite the global recession, IP bandwidth growth continues unabated and could actually be accelerating due to video and cloud computing bandwidth projections. Pricing issues aside, core router vendors with pre-standard 100GE solutions know they will be well positioned to gain share when the market improves. And optical equipment vendors like Nortel are positioning with 40G and 100G transport solutions.
Cisco\'s Visual Networking Index predicts rapid IP traffic growth - service providers need to be prepared
Cisco released its latest update of the Visual Network Index, the company\'s ongoing effort to forecast the growth and use of IP networking worldwide. Highlights from the forecast include:
"¢ Global IP traffic will increase by a factor of five from 2008 to 2013, approaching 56 exabytes per month in 2013 (up from about 9 exabytes per month in 2008).
"¢ By 2013, annual global IP traffic will reach two-thirds of a zettabyte; the sum of all forms of video (TV, VoD, Internet video, and P2P) will exceed 90% of global consumer traffic.
"¢ By 2013, global online video will be 60% of consumer Internet traffic (up from 32% in 2009).
"¢ Mobile data traffic will roughly double each year from 2008 through 2013.
For those of us who thought a yottabyte was a cute snack from a Star Wars movie, Cisco puts these traffic and storage measures into context:
"¢ 1 petabyte = 1,000 terabytes or 250,000 DVDs
"¢ 1 exabyte = 1,000 petabytes or 250 million DVDs
"¢ 1 zettabyte = 1,000 exabytes or 250 billion DVDs
"¢ 1 yottabyte = 1,000 zettabytes or 250 trillion DVDs.
While some readers may question the independence and objectivity of a vendor bandwidth forecast, very few would argue that IP bandwidth is not increasing. So we accept it as indicative of a "