Cisco Systems (News - Alert) today unveiled its latest study on service provider traffic trends. The study, done during the third quarter, is created by compiling and analyzing actual traffic information from more than 20 service providers’ networks.

Doug Webster, director, market management for Cisco’s service provider group, notes that 37 percent of overall traffic is video, or “visual networking” as Cisco likes to refer to it.

He adds that while many believe P2P traffic takes up the bulk of Internet bandwidth, in fact it takes up just 38 percent. While that’s still significant and continues to increase, it increased less this year than it did in the past.

 

Here are some other highlights:

·         Globally, the average broadband connection (primarily residential subscribers and some business users) generates approximately 11.4 gigabytes of Internet traffic per month.

 

·         Globally, the average broadband connection consumes about 4.3 gigabytes of visual networking applications (advanced services such as video, social networking and collaboration) traffic per month.

·         The top 1 percent of global subscribers generated more than 20 percent of all traffic.

 

·         The top 10 percent of global subscribers generated more than 60 percent of all traffic.

 

·         25 percent (or 93.3 megabytes per day per connection) of global Internet traffic is generated during the Internet “prime time” period.

 

·         A peak Internet hour has 20 percent more traffic than a nonpeak Internet hour. The peak Internet hour averages 18 megabytes of traffic per connection (per hour), while nonpeak Internet hours average 15 megabytes of traffic per connection (per hour).

 

·         The peak Internet visual networking hour has almost 25 percent more traffic than average hourly Internet traffic.

 

Webster adds that while Cisco has forecast that Internet traffic will increase five-fold by 2013, service providers actually will need to plan for a seven-fold increase in Internet traffic to accommodate traffic peaks as seen above.