Cisco report says video to make up 84% of all US internet traffic by 2018, up from current 78%
Cat Videos, Binge TV Watching Will Account for 84 Percent of Internet Traffic, Cisco Says — Internet traffic will likely more than double in five years, and much of it will be used for online video …
Context & Ripple Effects
Cisco has been charting this curve for years: its 2010 forecast showed online video overtaking P2P filesharing as the top traffic category, and a 2009 NewTeeVee analysis had already logged a 40% one-year jump in time spent watching video. The new projection extends the same arc — from video being the biggest slice of traffic to video being nearly all of it.
The 78%-to-84% figure lands alongside Cisco's earlier call that Wi-Fi would overtake wired network traffic by 2015, which frames the report less as a standalone number than as the demand-side justification for the company's network-equipment business: total traffic more than doubling in five years means someone has to build the pipes.
First-order effects
- US broadband operators have to plan capacity against peak-hour video loads rather than average traffic, since binge TV watching concentrates demand into evening hours even as the aggregate share climbs toward 84%.
- For Cisco, the forecast is direct marketing for its switching, routing, and video-infrastructure portfolio — announced weeks after its May 2014 push to put $1,000-$2,000 desktop videoconferencing units on every office desk, extending the video thesis from consumers to enterprise desks.
Second-order effects
- Content distributors and CDNs become the swing customers: if video approaches nine-tenths of US traffic, interconnection and delivery costs shift from a background expense to the central negotiating point between content owners and access providers.
- Wi-Fi offload gains urgency as a relief valve for wired backhaul — consistent with Cisco's own 2011 projection — pushing carriers to treat wireless as a distribution layer for video rather than a complement to it.
Third-order effects
- If video keeps absorbing the traffic mix, network economics consolidate around whoever owns both the transport infrastructure and the forecasting narrative — an advantage Cisco's annual reports are designed to reinforce.
- A near-total-video internet makes capacity management and traffic-shaping practices politically charged: when 84% of traffic is one category, debates over how carriers manage it stop being technical footnotes and become regulatory questions.
The trend: Internet traffic is consolidating around on-demand video, with each successive Cisco forecast raising the ceiling — from video beating filesharing in 2010 to video becoming effectively the whole pipe by 2018.