Global IP Traffic Will Grow 23% Annually to 2017

Global IP traffic has increased more than fourfold in the past five years, and will increase three fold over the next five years, according to the Cisco Visual Networking Index.  Growth would surprise absolutely nobody. But the relatively restrained rate of annual growth might.

Overall, IP traffic will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23 percent from 2012 to 2017. Given rates of growth that had been higher in the past, that relative slowdown in growth rates is noteworthy.

Among other notable changes, metro traffic will surpass long-haul traffic in 2014, and will account for 58 percent of total IP traffic by 2017. 

Metro traffic will grow nearly twice as fast as long-haul traffic from 2012 to 2017 in large part because of the increasingly significant role of content delivery networks, which bypass long-haul links and deliver traffic to metro and regional backbones.

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) also will carry 51 percent of all Internet traffic in 2017 globally, up from 34 percent in 2012. 

Also, nearly half of all IP traffic will originate with non-PC devices by 2017. 

In 2012, only 26 percent of consumer IP traffic originated with non-PC devices, but by 2017 the non-PC share of consumer IP traffic will grow to 49 percent. 

PC-originated traffic will grow at a CAGR of 14 percent, while TVs, tablets, mobile phones, and machine-to-machine (M2M) modules will have traffic growth rates of 24 percent, 104 percent, 79 percent, and 82 percent, respectively.

Traffic from wireless and mobile devices will exceed traffic from wired devices by 2016. By 2017, wired devices will account for 45 percent of IP traffic, while Wi-Fi and mobile devices will account for 55 percent of IP traffic. 

In 2012, wired devices accounted for the majority of IP traffic at 59 percent.