Cisco has said that the proliferation of Tablet PC devices, smartphones and other gear will boost the number of Internet-connected devices to over 15 billion by the year 2015. This, in turn, will drive up Internet traffic to an astonishing 966 exabytes (one quintillion bytes) a year.
Consumer video content will dominate this Internet traffic. According to Cisco, by 2015, one million minutes of video content will be watched by Internet users per second. About 40 percent of the world's population will be online by that time, Cisco predicts.
If this outlook is correct, it brings up some worrying concerns that experts and industry insiders have warned about for many years now.
"What you are seeing is this massive growth in devices, the way devices are being used and are connected to the internet and what users expect them to do," said Suraj Shetty, Cisco vice president for global marketing.
"All this is putting a lot of pressure on the internet and the next generation internet faces issues handling not just the proliferation of these devices but how they are going to grow and be intelligent enough to be connected to you. The most important question we face is how to manage all this traffic intelligently."
At the very least, there is a need to push IPv6 adoption broadly. IPv4 was created in 1977, providing up to 4.3 billion addresses that could be used for widescale network communications. At the same that seemed like more than enough, but back in February, the last batch of IPv4 addresses were handed out by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.
"We are running out of IPv4 addresses and the adoption of IPv6 is going to be front and centre of everything for the next several years," Shetty told BBC News. "The implication for vendors like Cisco is that we have to come up with a platform that can help scale the internet to handle a lot of the traffic and to do it smartly. If you want to keep adding billions and billions of devices, the only answer is IPv6."
Written by: James Delahunty @ 3 Jun 2011 14:45
