IDC Predicts Global Broadband Internet Traffic to Grow 50% Each Year

The International Data Corporation (IDC), a global telecoms analyst firm, has predicted that “power users” who consume a “disproportionate amount of bandwidth” will drive internet generated broadband traffic to grow by approximately 50% year over year on fixed line ISP networks and double on mobile platforms.

Apparently this will all eventually equate to an end-user demand for worldwide fixed line and Mobile Broadband services of 116,539 Petabytes per month by 2015 (up from just 9,665 Petabytes per month in 2010). One of the biggest drivers for this usage will be HD video streaming content, although web browsing, peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing and others will also play their part.

Matt Davis, Director of Consumer and SMB Telecom Services, said:

“The enormous growth in end-user demand for both fixed and mobile broadband services is staggering. Despite enormous growth projected in IDC’s forecast, it is difficult to overestimate this phenomenon. Fixed and mobile operators will have to deal with a new reality that will tax network resources to the limit —and perhaps past the limit.”

We’d disagree that this is a “new reality“, as Davis suggests above. Consumer broadband traffic has been surging forward for years and the problems with managing and adapting to that are nothing new, although this doesn’t make them any less challenging. The report also claims that bandwidth usage strongly correlates with the availability of faster broadband speeds, which again is nothing new.

Increasing capacity and speed has always resulted in the adoption of new services and greater use. For example, since getting a stable 10Mbps connection at home three years ago I now rarely stream YouTube videos in anything less than HD whereas before I could hardly use SD streams. Why bother with SD when you can watch in HD? It’s an easy choice; provided you have the speed and usage flexibility in the first place.

The report also makes another startlingly obvious recommendation when it states that ISPs “need to deliver more bandwidth, as this growth is necessary to spur new service usage and drive new subscriptions and revenue“. Unfortunately the full details of this report would cost $7,500 to show so we’re left with a somewhat bland summary. On the other hand Cisco’s far superior Visual Networking Index (VNI) is free.