MEA to have highest growth in IP traffic

Manama : The Middle East and Africa (MEA) region will see the highest growth rate of IP traffic in the world with 2.4 billion new devices and connections to be added by 2020, according to the 11th annual Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) Complete Forecast for 2015 to 2020.

Global IP traffic will nearly triple at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22 per cent over the next five years, as per the prediction.

Over one billion new Internet users are expected to join the global Internet community, growing from three billion in 2015 to 4.1 billion by 2020. The MEA region will see 445 million new Internet users by 2020 at a CAGR of 10.8pc. 

Over the next five years, global IP networks will support up to 10 billion new devices and connections, increasing from 16.3 billion in 2015 to 26.3 billion by 2020. There are projected to be 3.4 devices and connections per capita by 2020—up from 2.2 per capita in 2015.

“One of the most significant changes of the next few years will be the dramatic increase in worldwide connectivity via the Internet. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than across the Middle East and Africa where we are looking at the highest growth rate in the world,” said Mike Weston, Vice President, Cisco Middle East. 

“The rapid increase in connected devices and IP traffic will create new opportunities that arise from digitisation, delivering benefits such as reduced costs, increased efficiency and improvement in the lives of citizens.”

Video services and content continue to be the dominant leader compared with all other applications. Internet video will account for 79pc of global Internet traffic by 2020—up from 63pc in 2015. The world will reach three trillion Internet video minutes per month by 2020, which is five million years of video per month, or about one million video minutes every second. HD and Ultra HD Internet video will make up 82pc of Internet video traffic by 2020—up from 53pc in 2015.

In Middle East and Africa, Internet video traffic will grow eight-fold from 2015 to 2020, a compound annual growth rate of 52pc. This means that for MEA 169 billion minutes (321,793 years) of video content will cross the Internet each month in 2020. That’s 64,359 minutes of video streamed or downloaded every second.

With the growing dependence on mobile and fixed broadband networks, security concerns are increasingly becoming top of mind for service providers, governments, businesses and consumers. The new DDoS analysis suggests that security breaches can represent up to 10pc of a country’s total Internet traffic while they are occurring. Over the next five years, DDoS attacks are projected to increase from 6.6 million to 17 million attacks. These initial findings underscore the need for more comprehensive security measures to protect data and reduce network exposure to such risks.