By now, industry observers are all well aware of the daunting statistics concerning video traffic. As Cisco (News - Alert) has pointed out, we are entering the zettabyte era, with video currently accounting for approximately 60 percent of global IP traffic, and in some developed markets likely to exceed 70 percent in just two to three years. In this second installment of our blog series, we’ll take a closer look at the numbers and explore what solutions are presently available to keep up with the surge in video across the global network, including that of an American data center co-location provider, EdgeConneX and its Edge Data Centers, as recently reported in a TechZone360 article, “Network Shifts to Support Video Distribution”.

According to Cisco, it would take an individual over 5 million years to watch the amount of video that will cross global IP networks each month in 2019. That’s certainly a lot of “Orange is the New Black,” and “Breaking Bad” reruns, and other over-the-top content (OTT) binge-watching. Moreover, nearly a million minutes of video content is expected to cross the network every second by 2019. As Facebook (News - Alert) recently surpassed YouTube for uploaded video content, that projection may well be conservative.

Globally, consumer Internet video traffic will be 80 percent of all consumer Internet traffic in 2019, up from 64 percent in 2014, the most recent figure available. The sum of all forms of video—TV, video on demand (VoD), Internet, and P2P file sharing—will be in the range of 80 to 90 percent of global consumer traffic by 2019.

Internet video to TV will continue to grow at a rapid pace, representing 17 percent of consumer Internet video traffic by 2019, up from 16 percent in 2014. As the “cord-cutting” ethos continues to be embraced by more and more consumers, and channels that were once bound by the confines of a cable television subscription can now be accessed for a small monthly fee with no contract over the Internet, that prediction may also be conservative. Especially considering the increase of original programming from Netflix, a push from Hulu (News - Alert) to remain competitive, premium subscription cable television provider HBO recently getting into the fray in launching HBO GO, along with Nickelodeon and network TV stalwart CBS each initiating online platforms.

Consumer VoD traffic will double by 2019 as viewers continue to embrace non-linear cable television offerings. HD will be 70 percent of IP VOD traffic in 2019, up from 59 percent in 2014.

With so much more video traffic expected to traverse the global network, the question of exactly how the network will keep up is critical. Some solutions are on the immediate horizon, including a new transatlantic subsea fiber optic cable, the America Europe Connect (AEConnect), the latest, lowest latency and most advanced transatlantic submarine cable system connecting Europe and the UK to the United States, scheduled for completion in December.

Another solution is IPv6 (Internet Protocol Version 6), the successor to Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4). IPv6 is designed to allow the Internet to grow steadily, both in terms of the number of hosts connected and the total amount of data traffic transmitted. Nearly 10 percent of websites tracked in 2014 are IPv6-enabled, a tenfold increase from the previous year. As these 10 percent of websites tend to be the top providers of content and applications globally (Google (News - Alert), Facebook, YouTube, Netflix, etc.), they represent an average 40 percent of content and Web activities reachable over IPv6. While IPv6 was designed as an evolutionary upgrade to the Internet Protocol, it will coexist with the older IPv4 for some time and is not expected to become the dominant protocol until 2018.

A more immediate solution to the increase of video traffic and its strain on global networks can be witnessed in the U.S., offered by data center colocation providers and their content delivery strategies concerning “the new Edge of the Internet.”

For these providers, the edge is the closest physical location to a broadband or wireless data consumer where content, including video and mobile applications, can be accessed, thus extending the Internet beyond the five main peering points in the U.S., and mitigating buffering and other performance-related issues. By establishing peering points within local markets, or edge data centers, video and the eyeballs that consume video and other high-bandwidth intensive content, are brought closer together in the same location.

About the Author: Daniel Highet is a Technical Writer, at iMiller Public Relations (News - Alert)