Cisco predicts highest growth in global Internet Protocol traffic in region

Muscat: Middle East and Africa (MEA) region will see a six-fold growth in Internet Protocol (IP) traffic by 2020, which is the highest in terms of a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 41 per cent, according to the 11th annual Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) Complete Forecast for 2015 to 2020.
It added that global IP traffic will nearly triple at a CAGR of 22 per cent over the next five years.
More than one billion new Internet users are expected to join the global Internet community, growing from three billion in 2015 to 4.1 billion by 2020. The MEA region will see 445 million new Internet users by 2020 at a CAGR of 10.8 per cent.
The global digitisation transformation, based on the adoption of personal devices and the deployment of machine-to-machine (M2M) connections will have an even greater impact on traffic growth. Over the next five years, global IP networks will support up to 10 billion new devices and connections, increasing from 16.3 billion in 2015 to 26.3 billion by 2020. There are projected to be 3.4 devices and connections per capita by 2020—up from 2.2 per capita in 2015.
“One of the most significant changes in the next few years will be the dramatic increase in worldwide connectivity via the Internet. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than across the Middle East and Africa where we are looking at the highest growth rate in the world, with 2.4 billion new devices and connections to be added by 2020,” said Mike Weston, vice president, Cisco Middle East.
“The rapid increase in connected devices and IP traffic will create new opportunities that arise from digitization, delivering benefits, such as reduced costs, increased efficiency and improvement in the lives of citizens.”
Video services and content continue to be the dominant leader, compared with all other applications. Internet video will account for 79 per cent of global Internet traffic by 2020—up from 63 per cent in 2015. The world will reach three trillion Internet video minutes per month by 2020, which is five million years of video per month, or about one million video minutes every second. HD and Ultra HD Internet video will make up 82 per cent of Internet video traffic by 2020—up from 53 per cent in 2015.
In MEA, Internet video traffic will grow eight-fold from 2015 to 2020, at a CAGR of 52 per cent. This means that in MEA, 169 billion minutes (321,793 years) of video content will cross the Internet each month in 2020. That's 64,359 minutes of video streamed or downloaded every second.