Video Dominates Global Traffic

International traffic now is 90 percent video, according to Pacnet (News - Alert) CEO, William Barney, whose firm now is building data centers on its Pacific region network to support a variety of video traffic types, ranging from cable TV to streaming video. 

Separately, Cisco (News - Alert) estimates that Internet video is now over one third of all consumer Internet traffic, and will approach 40 percent of consumer Internet traffic by the end of 2010, not including the amount of video exchanged through P2P file sharing.

The sum of all forms of video (TV, video on demand, Internet, and P2P) will continue to exceed 91 percent of global consumer traffic by 2014, Cisco also predicts.  Internet video alone will account for 57 percent of all consumer Internet traffic in 2014.

Advanced Internet video (3D and HD) will increase 23-fold between 2009 and 2014. By 2014, 3D and HD Internet video will comprise 46 percent of consumer Internet video traffic.

Also, video became the dominant form of mobile data traffic in 2010, accounting for more than 40 percent of the total volume in wireless networks worldwide, according to Bytemobile (News - Alert). With the rise of full-length and studio-quality videos and live streaming of multimedia content on mobile devices, as well as the emergence of two-way video communications, Bytemobile expects mobile data traffic to spike to an all-time high in 2011, when video-based content will account for over 60 percent of network traffic.

In part, video also will be part of the shift to cloud computing, with applications and video moving to a distributed, in-the-cloud model. As a result, there will be a massive discontinuity over the next 10 years in our business models," said Joe Weinman, Hewlett-Packard (News - Alert) Media and Entertainment, Worldwide Industry Solutions practice lead. 

"We are all becoming video providers; everything else is just rounding error," said Weinman. 

Verizon's "Flexview," in large part, is about "buying movies and storing them in the cloud," said Ihab Tarazi, Verizon VP, in a statement. 

Traffic is not revenue, of course. But as far as global and local bandwidth consumption is concerned, video is driving, and will drive, global and local traffic on all networks.