Nearly half of the world’s population will have access to the internet by 2017, according to a report from Cisco. The networking firm predicted 48% of people across the globe will be able to go online in the next five years – equivalent to 3.6 billion individuals – leading to a trebling of data going across networks compared with today’s volume.
The UK alone will see internet traffic rise by an annual growth rate of 17% between 2012 and 2017, with an equivalent of one million DVDs per hour being transferred across the country’s infrastructure. This will be enabled by a surge in broadband speeds, rising from an average of 16.5Mbps to almost 50Mbps in the same period.
A significant portion of the traffic will be video, according to Cisco – 69% of data in 2017 for both businesses and consumers, compared with 54% last year. Globally, average speeds will rise from 11.3Mbps to 39Mbps, with the average household generating 74.5GB every month. In 2012, this figure stood at 31.6GB.
