Cisco IP Traffic Triples In 2020, Zettabyte Levels Targeted Globally

Cisco IP traffic is moving into the zettabyte level and will hit 2.3 zettabytes by the year 2020, based on the projection of Cisco officials. With the rapid growth of the number of Internet users around the globe, including the excessive increase in the use of machine-to-machine connections and personal gadgets, the trend is expected to grow further in the global IP traffic, nearly going triple for the next five years.

The global IP traffic will increase by 22 percent per year for the next five years, as the amount of Internet users grew from 3 billion in 2015 to 4.1 billion by the year 2020, while the number of new gadgets that jumps on these networks leap from 16.3 billion last year to 26.3 billion in the next  five years, Cisco News Room reported.

Other factors cited is the rise in video content, the consistent development of the Internet of things, the choice of consumers and business users over mobile networks rather than fixed networks and the worldwide expansion of WiFi.  All these help contribute to the establishment of a domain where global networks are pressured to provide better performance and additional capability as the number of traffic increases.

In addition, some trends were also included as part of the continued transfer from PCs to smartphones as the basic method for consumers and business users to access the Internet. In 2015, reports indicate that 47 percent of Internet traffic has been recorded by non-PC gadgets that include tablets, smartphones and connected TVs. By 2020, such number is expected to grow up to 71 percent - 29 percent from the PCs and 30 percent from smartphones, Silicon Beat reported.

Considering the rising dependence of businesses and consumers on fixed broadband and mobile networks, Cisco, along with Arbor Networks, has included that concerns on security threats in the  VNI, specifically distributed denial-of-service attacks. These DDoS breaches, wherein networks are attacked by an automated traffic from several IP sources, can responsible for 10 percent of total Internet traffic of the country, and the amount of these attacks will grow from 2015's 6.6 million to 17 million by 2020.

The Internet-related figures shown are indicative of the need for more measures to be developed, including better security precautions to protect against these attacks.