Cisco Sees Brave New World, But Consumers May Not Be Ready

Cisco Systems is good at writing self-serving press releases.

But many of them are interesting in their own right. Wednesday’s is no exception.

The networker claims that in the next five years Internet traffic will increase by a factor of five. In other words, by 2013, net will carry an astonishing 56 exabytes of data a month, or the equivalent of 9 billion bytes of data for each of the 6 billion people on the planet today.

(An exabyte is a 1 with 18 zeros behind it.)

This is mind numbing. But the Cisco release wades even deeper into the digital morass. During the same period, mobile broadband traffic will double annually, or grow 66 times in total.

Fueling this growth of both mobile and Internet traffic is video. The release claims that 90 percent of consumer traffic by 2013 will be TV signals, video on demand, Internet video and peer-to-peer sharing.

Of course all this would be good news for Cisco, which supplies the routers and switches that carry Internet traffic.

But it implies dramatic changes in consumer behavior to go hand in hand with a substantive build out of the broadband network. This makes me skeptical. Will we really be such ardent subscribers to video in five years, and will our measly 3 Mbps home connections expand enough to support it?

I’m emotionally ready for this brave new world. I don’t think our service providers are.

Of course, Cisco could be right.