IT and Society: Cisco presents Global IP traffic forecast

Cisco has released new annual report titled Visual Networking Index (VNI), which focuses on the prospects of the Global Web development.

Thus it reads that fueled by an explosion of network-connected devices the total amount of global IP traffic will quadruple by 2015 over the past five years and reach 966 exabytes per year.

The number of network-connected devices will be more than 15 billion, twice the world's population by 2015, Cisco found. PCs will still be the leading platform with which consumers connect to the Internet in 2015, but traffic generation from PCs will drop to 87% in 2015 from 97% in 2010.

Cisco analysts suppose that by 2015 there will be nearly 3 billion Internet users - more than 40% of the world's projected population - with an average fixed broadband Internet access speed of 28Mbps, four times up from 7Mbps in 2010.

Mobile network connection speeds will increase 10-fold by 2015. Thus the average mobile connection speed (215 kbps in 2010) will exceed 2.2 Mbps in 2015. There will be over 7.1 billion mobile-connected devices, nearly one mobile device per person by 2015. Analysts believe that in 2015 smartphone owners will generate and consume about 1,3 Gb of data per month.