A recently released Cisco white paper predicts that the Internet’s growth will continue at breakneck speeds and that total IP traffic will increase six-fold between 2007 and 2012.

The white paper outlines the explosive effects that consumer demand for video continues to have on the expansion and capacity of the Internet. Some of the paper’s highlights include:

Internet video is now approximately one-quarter of all consumer Internet traffic, not including the amount of video exchanged through P2P file sharing. Internet video was 22 percent at the end of 2007, and will reach 32 percent by the end of this year.

The sum of all forms of video (TV, VoD, Internet, and P2P) will account for close to 90 percent of consumer traffic by 2012. Internet video alone will account for nearly 50 percent of all consumer Internet traffic in 2012.

In 2010 Internet video will surpass P2P in volume. This will be the first time since 2000 that any application has displaced P2P as the top traffic driver.

In 2012, Internet video will be nearly 400 times the U.S. Internet backbone in 2000. It would take well over half a million years to watch all the online video that will cross the network each month in 2012. Internet video will generate 10 exabytes per month in 2012.

The Internet is (still) not collapsing under the weight of online video. Service providers are accelerating their infrastructure upgrade plans in response to the traffic growth. As a result of the upgrades, utilization levels of international Internet backbones actually declined in 2007, as reported by Telegeography.1 In the near term, the most formidable challenge that online video poses for the Internet backbone will be flash crowds rather than the overall volume of traffic.

YouTube is just the beginning. Online video will experience three waves of growth. Even with a six-fold increase between 2007 and 2012, current Internet video growth is in its initial stages. Internet video to the PC screen will soon be exceeded by a second wave arising from the delivery of Internet video to the TV screen. Beyond 2015, a third wave of video traffic will result from video communications.

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