Streaming video to outpace P2P traffic growth

From CNET News.com: Video is still the killer app of the Internet, but peer-to-peer services like BitTorrent will no longer account for the bulk of traffic on the Net as streaming services grow at a quicker pace over the next few years.

For 10 years, peer-to-peer traffic, such as BitTorrent, which includes some video, has been the largest type of traffic on the Internet. But according to Cisco Systems, streaming video will grow at a faster growth rate over the next few years. And starting this year, streaming video will account for more traffic on the Net than peer-to-peer traffic.

According to Cisco's annual Visual Networking Index Forecast, Internet traffic will grow more than fourfold by 2014, and video will account for much of that growth. In fact, Cisco predicts that in the next four years, more than 90 percent of all content traversing the Net will be some form of video, whether it's peer-to-peer or streamed from servers.

"It's not that peer-to-peer traffic is declining," said Doug Webster, senior director of worldwide service provider marketing for Cisco. "It's just growing at a slower rate compared to other types of video traffic. This could be because streamed video content is not so hard to find anymore. And because streaming preserves the quality of service, it's the method of choice for many commercial services."

The forecast, which looks at traffic projections for 2009 through 2014, predicts that global Internet traffic will increase to 767 exabytes by 2014, a fourfold increase. This amount is 100 exabytes higher than the projected level in 2013, which is the equivalent of 10 times all the traffic traversing IP networks in 2008. To put this growth into perspective, the nearly 64 exabytes of global IP traffic per month projected for 2014 is equivalent to 16 billion DVDs; 21 trillion MP3s; or 399 quadrillion text messages, Cisco said.

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