Bandwidth Explosion: Network Infrastructure Struggles to Keep Up with Demand

By Dennis Kuba
May 2, 2012

With only one-third of the world connected online, we are already experiencing a network explosion.
“According to Cisco, global IP traffic increased eightfold over the five years leading up to 2010 and will quadruple by 2015, hitting 966 exabytes (nearly one zettabyte) for the full year,” reports Ars Technica. “That will be the equivalent of all movies ever made crossing IP networks every four minutes.”
Video will account for more than 50 percent of consumer Internet traffic this year. By 2015, on-demand video traffic will be the equivalent of three billion DVDs per month, and one million minutes worth of video will cross global IP networks every second.
In business traffic, videoconferencing is growing faster than any other application.
Advances in network infrastructure including the upgrading of undersea cables, OpenFlow, dark fiber, and 400 Gigabit Ethernet all promise to accommodate growth over the next ten years.

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