I got some good news today. Hulu.com is putting the first season of my favorite TV show, ever, “The Mole,” online. (Seriously. Watch it. It’s good.) There is no doubt that video on the Internet has left the realm of novelty and has entered the mainstream; many people watch as much or more “tv” delivered via the Internet then people actually watch a physical television. Some, like myself, only watch video downloaded via the Internet.

The upshot of all of this is that Cisco recently updated their Visual Networking Index which tries to forecast where the Internet will be in the future. And it’s breathtaking.

• In 2008, the Internet transferred 9 exabytes (1 exabyte = 1.074 billion gigabytes) worth of data each month. Cisco predicts it will carry 56 exabytes per month by 2013. This means that annual traffic will reach around 2/3rds of a zettabyte (1 zettabyte = 1024 exabytes).


• The boogieman of years past, P2P traffic, will continue to grow in absolute terms but decline as a percentage of Internet traffic. Internet video, now 1/3^rd of all consumer Internet traffic not including P2P file sharing, will account for over 60% of all consumer Internet traffic by 2013. Including P2P, TV, and Video on Demand, this will account for over 91% of all consumer traffic by 2013. Video communications traffic growth is small but accelerating, real-time video is growing in important, and VoD traffic will double every two years through 2013.


• Mobile phone data traffic will also double every year through 2013, and 64% of that will be video data – which gives a lie to the idea of calling it a mobile ‘phone.’


• While today, business Internet traffic is twice the volume of WAN traffic, but video on the WAN will result in business WAN traffic growing at a faster pace than business Internet by 2013.


• Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook will merge to a single social networking site, called “YouTwitFace!” – No, wait, that one was from the Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien.

One of the traditional solutions to solving online video problems in Enterprise environments has been to block all Internet video entirely; as businesses will require more video information to collaborate between other businesses and with customers; this becomes a less viable option. The trick is managing network video to make sure it co-exists with your data applications – and the sooner this happens, the easier it will be in the long run.

Earlier, we wrote about how March Madness affects Internet performance every… well, March, and as such, it was such a predicable event that IT pros should be aware of the effects of the tournament by now. This growth in video is no different, it’s just constant – a March Madness every day.

This means that if you haven’t already prepared for network service in the era of Net Video, it’s time to step up, think about whether or not to filter packets, what to filter, how to protect your data applications, know which applications need which quality of service, and understand the differences between quality of service tiers. Five years from now, handling Internet video will be the main priority of the network engineer’s job; so it’s a good idea to study up today.