IP traffic in India to grow 33% annually: Cisco

The Internet protocol (IP) traffic in India will quadruple between 2014 and 2019 at a pace of 33 per cent annually, spurred by rising usage of mobile data and additional networked devices, among others, Cisco said today.
According to the 10th annual Cisco visual networking index (VNI) forecast, the annual IP traffic will grow 4-fold from 2014 to 2019, a compound annual growth rate of 33 per cent.
"In India, IP traffic will reach 4.0 exabytes per month in 2019, up from 967 petabytes per month in 2014," Cisco said.
The US-based networking solutions firm sees the average fixed broadband speed in India growing 2.9-fold to 12 Mbps in 2019 from 4.0 Mbps in 2014. The number of networked devices, it said, will increase to 1.6 billion from 1.1 billion in the same period.

The expected drivers are surging mobile data consumption, proliferation in networked devices, faster broadband speed and higher usage of videos.
"Collectively, these variables are expected to help IP traffic in India grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 33 per cent - as against a corresponding global CAGR of 23 per cent," it added.

"We are clearly headed towards a new era in Internet communications as the Internet of Everything (IoE) gains momentum, with M2M connections predicted to triple, reaching 10.5 billion by 2019," Cisco (India and SAARC) Managing Director (Global Service Provider Business) Sanjay Kaul said.
Mobile data traffic is expected to grow 67 per cent and reach 1.1 exabytes per month in 2019, up from 88 petabytes per month in 2014.

"India's mobile share was 9 per cent of the total IP traffic in 2014, which will be 28 per cent in 2019," it predicted.
"We look forward to tracking the IoE economy in coming years and its impact on healthcare, agriculture, manufacturing, retail, transportation and other key industries," Kaul said.
Smartphones will account for 40 per cent (651.4 million) of all networked devices in 2019 compared with 13 per cent (139.8 million) in 2014, and 74 per cent of all networked devices will be mobile-connected in 2019, it added.