In spite of consumers’ wide adoption of the Internet in the past few years, Internet traffic still has only one way to go: up, says research firm IDC. In fact, Framingham, MA-based IDC says we ain’t seen nothing yet. It predicts Internet traffic will double each year for the next five years.
Using petabits as a measure, IDC predicts that the amount of information flowing over the Internet will grow from 180 petabits a day now to 5,175 petabits per day by the end of 2007. A petabit is a quadrillion (1015) bits.
“To put these figures into perspective,” IDC says, “the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress amounts to only 10 terabytes of information. By 2007, IDC expects Internet users will access, download, and share the information equivalent of the entire Library of Congress more than 64,000 times every day.”
The IDC study finds that, although growth in the number of Internet users will continue to be an important traffic driver, the migration of those Internet users to broadband connections will be even more significant. In fact, IDC says, broadband will become the fastest growing and largest segment in terms of Internet traffic volume generated. IDC expects mobile Internet users to have only a minimal impact on traffic for the next five years.
IDC predictions are in its new report “Worldwide Bandwidth End-User Forecast and Analysis, 2003-2007: More is Still Not Enough.”
Back...
