By Troy Dreier
Online video’s strong growth will continue for years, says Cisco. In 2021, 82 percent of all online traffic will be video, predicts the just-released Cisco Visual Networking Index (2016-2021). That up from 73 percent of all traffic in 2016. Live video streaming will increase by 15x in that time, growing to 13 percent of all traffic. While augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) will see an impressive 20x growth, they will still count for only 1 percent of all entertainment traffic.
“This is being driven not only by more video being consumed, but also by higher definition of video being consumed: SD to HD to UHD,” says Thomas Barnett, Jr., director of service provider marketing and thought leadership at Cisco. “There have been several independent online behavioral studies indicating that as a digital society, we prefer video over other means of media and communication.”
Looking at global averages, Cisco finds households that have cut the cord and no longer subscribe to cable or satellite providers use far more data. In 2016, the average household used 63 GB of bandwidth per month, while the average cord-cutting household used 117 GB per month.
