The Impact of Video and Rich Media on the Internet – A ‘zettabyte’ by 2015?

An upsurge of technological change and a rising tide of new forms of data are working a deep transformation of the Internet’s capabilities and uses. In this third phase of Net evolution, network architectures and commercial business plans reflect the dominance of rich video and media traffic.
From YouTube, IPTV, and high-definition images, to “cloud computing” and ubiquitous mobile cameras—to 3D games, virtual worlds, and photorealistic telepresence—the new wave is swelling into an exaflood of Internet and IP traffic. An exabyte is 10 to the 18th. We estimate that by 2015, U.S. IP traffic could reach an annual total of one zettabyte (1021 bytes), or one million million billion bytes.
We began using the term “exaflood” in 2001 to convey the vast gulf between the total traffic on the nation’s local area networks, then 15 exabytes a month, and the thousandfold smaller flows across the Internet. We predicted then that the deployment of broadband networks would bring exafloods of data to the Net. See complete text in http://www.discovery.org/a/4428 By: Bret Swanson & George Gilder
Discovery Institute
January 29, 2008