Online Video Boom Leads to Surge in Data Traffic

According to Cisco's Visual Networking Index, consumer internet traffic will grow by 260% until 2018 to an estimated total of 83,298 petabytes or 83 million terabytes per month. The growth in IP traffic will mainly be driven by an increase in online video consumption, which is expected to account for 76% of all consumer internet traffic in 2018, up from 60% in 2013.

According to Cisco's estimates internet usage will continue to shift to mobile devices through the next few years. Mobile data consumption is tipped to account for 16% of consumer traffic in 2018, up from just 4% in the past year.