Top 5 Data Trends from Cisco VNI Report

This morning Cisco came out with its annual forecast of data trends. Although the Mary Meeker presentation from last month received a lot of press coverage, in my opinion the Cisco report is far more useful, controversial and important. Their previous predictions around mobile and non-PC traffic becoming the majority of data traffic were updated, but most of us knew those trends already: old news. What I found most interesting were the comments around:

#1: Peak period traffic is growing much faster than overall traffic.

#2: Video will represent about 80% of all traffic by 2018. To quote Cisco: “The implications of video growth would be difficult to overstate.”

#3: In large part, that will be driven by UltraHD/4K TV: more than 20% of traffic will be high resolution 4K bitstreams.

#4: Metro data traffic will grow nearly twice as fast as long haul.

#5: CDN (Content Delivery Network) share will be more than 50% by 2018.

All of this has implications for customers, consumers, businesses, media companies,telecoms providers AND regulators. And net neutrality, for those who care about such things…