Average broadband use: 11 gigs a month

The average global broadband connection generates 11.4 gigabytes of Internet traffic a month and a third of that is consumed by visual network applications such as video, social networking and collaboration content, according to the first Cisco Visual Networking Index Usage (VNI) study, results of which were released today.

The Cisco VNI Usage study joins the Cisco VNI Usage Forecast, now in its second year. Cisco worked with 20 of its service provider customers, who shared their anonymous, aggregated broadband network usage data from the third quarter of this year to enable Cisco to see actual VNI usage and correlate that to its forecasts, said Doug Webster, senior director, Market Management, for the Cisco Service Provider Group. The data comes primarily from consumer connections, although there may be some small-to-mid-sized business traffic mixed in.

“We decided to take another avenue,” Webster said. “The forecast is forward looking, while the VNI usage index looks at actual usage.”

That accomplishes multiple things, Webster said, including verifying that the forecasts are on track, but also seeing how the latest actual usage data might inform or impact plans for network expansion or architecture changes.

Along the latter lines, the VNI Usage study shows the peak usage for Internet traffic is 20% higher than average hourly usage and that “uber users,” representing less than 1% of the total user group, account for 20% of all traffic. Both numbers represent major potential impact on network infrastructure choices, Webster said.
The peak or “primetime” for Internet usage occurs between 9 p.m. and 1 a.m., when 93.3 megabytes per day per connection, or 25% of total traffic, is consumed, the VNI Usage study shows, and that is 20% above the average hourly usage.

“When we look at forecasts, we are looking at things in more linear fashion,” Webster said. “We look five years out and project traffic will grow five-fold. But with the usage study, we take into account this kind of granularity, which suggests that, in addition to the overall growth, we need to take into account a 20% bump to plan for the peak usage. So providers actually may need to be planning for a seven-fold increase over five years.”

Similarly, the recognition that heavy-Internet users are consuming 20% of all bandwidth has an impact on network planning.

“If you widen that a bit further, the top 10% of users consume 60% of the traffic,” Webster said. “That can raise architectural issues, particularly where there are shared connections. Super users can dramatically affect the well being of the network for everyone, which means service providers may have to make more liberal assumptions, more flexible assumptions, based on where super users reside.”

Service providers may want to use this data to inform other business decisions, such as whether or not to charge super users more than those who don’t generate as much Internet traffic, Webster said. “We’re not making a statement one way or another on that, but we are trying to provide them with the data they need to make their decision.”

Clearly, visual networking traffic is on the rise, the VNI Usage study shows, globally the average broadband connection consumes about 4.3 gigabytes of visual networking traffic, which is defined as video, social networking and collaboration. That is the equivalent of about 20.5 short-form Internet videos, or about 1.1 hours of Internet video per day.

“In the past we always have talked about how peer to peer traffic is dominating – in this study the findings show that that is not necessarily the case” Webster said. “It’s still a large percentage – 38% of overall traffic – but as percentage it is actually decreasing. It’s still growing in terms of the total amount of traffic but it is increasingly at a lesser rate than visual networking applications are growing.”

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

Per connection per day, this amount is roughly the equivalent of approximately 20.5 short- form Internet videos or approximately 1.1 hours of Internet video, whether streamed on its own, embedded in a Web page, or viewed as part of video communications.