A staggering 133 million network connections – that is the number that Cisco’s Visual Networking Index predicts will be the norm in South Africa by 2017.

The company elaborated that this means that South Africa’s internet protocol (IP) traffic will quadruple between 2012 and 2017 at a compound annual growth rate of 31% (almost a third). What’s more, South Africa’s IP traffic across both fixed and mobile lines is expected to reach an annual run rate of almost 6.5 billion gigabytes per year, over the next four years.

Putting this into perspective, this would equal two billion DVDs per year, 128 million DVDs per month, or 174 939 DVDs per hour.

Traffic peaks and pinnacles

The annual Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) Forecast (2012-2017) further asserted that IP traffic is expected to reach 511 petabytes per month by 2017, a substantial increase in last year’s monthly tally of 131 petabytes per month.

The good news is that the VNI also forecast that South Africa’s average fixed broadband speed will grow as well, almost threefold, from 2.5 Mbps to 6 Mbps. While we may do our fair share of complaining about broadband speeds  as compared to our Stateside and European counterparts, the forecast did note that average fixed broadband speed grew 28% from 2011 – 2012, from 2.0 Mbps to 2.5 Mbps.

Not surprisingly, video content is expected to account for a particularly data heavy use, with the forecast asserting that in South Africa, 38 billion minutes (72 436 years) of video content will cross the internet each month in 2017. Drilling down that number further, that equates to 14 487 minutes (or 241 hours) of video being streamed or downloaded every second.

Cisco added that as global service providers build out the Next Generation Internet, nearly half of the world’s population will have network and internet access by 2017. Most interestingly, the forecast billed the  average internet household (globally) as generating 74.5 gigabytes per month. It noted that, by comparison, in 2012, the average internet household generated 31.6 gigabytes of traffic per month. This means the data flow coming from a single household will more than double in the next four years.

This is your machine talking

In case you think that it is only actual people contributing to this phenomenal growth of IP connections, think again.

The forecast also revealed that the “Internet of Things” (the networked connection of physical objects) was “showing tangible growth and would have a measurable impact on global IP networks.”

Machine to machine (M2M) connections are expected to grow three-fold from two billion in 2012 to six billion by 2017, while annual global M2M IP traffic is forecast to grow 20-fold over this same period—from 197 petabytes in 2012 to 3.9 exabytes by 2017.

Apparently, it is applications such as video surveillance, smart meters, asset/package tracking, chipped pets/livestock, digital health monitors and a host of other next-generation M2M services that are driving this M2M growth.

To the point

“Cisco’s VNI Forecast once again showcases the seemingly insatiable demand for bandwidth in South Africa as well as around the globe and provides insights on the architectural considerations necessary to deliver on the ever-increasing experiences being delivered,” commented Leon Wright, Cisco South Africa’s chief technology officer.

“With more and more people, things, processes and data being connected in the Internet of Everything, the intelligent network and the service providers who operate them are more relevant than ever,” he concluded.

This phenomenal growth in connections and data does beg the question - where and how will it all be stored, managed, archived, and presuming at least some of it is precious, backed up? We suspect that if this forecast is on track, then servers, storage, and networking related issues may just have top billing on the technology landscape in the very near future as well.