Fali Whale
The Internet is a seemingly endless resource for our watching, listening, and chatting needs. Bandwidth, however, is not. Cisco Systems, the mobile networking company, released a report earlier this week suggesting that global Internet traffic is growing exponentially. Scientific American said that Cisco needed a newer term — zettabyte, or one trillion gigabytes — to measure both the amount of uploading and downloading traffic on the Web and the bandwidth required to accommodate it.
The release has a lot of interesting statistics, including the prediction that the Web will nearly quadruple in size over the next four years. Cisco claims that, by 2013, what amounts to 10 billion DVDs will cross the Internet each month. In other words, it will take over a million years to watch just one month’s worth of Web video traffic. The findings point to “consumer hyperactivity” — that with Web-enabled phones and mobile devices, more powerful computers, and multitasking, growth will only increase. For such a surge in volume, networks must be able to accommodate the growth.
Take a look at the study here. [From: Cisco Via: Scientific American and New York Times]
