Data traffic on metro access and aggregation networks is set to increase by 560 percent by 2017, according to a new study by Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs. The researchers predict that by 2017 more than 75 percent of that traffic will stay in metro networks, as compared to 57 percent today.
Some highlight of the “Metro Network Traffic Growth: An Architecture Impact Study”:
- Traffic from video services will skyrocket by as much as 720 percent by 2017.
- Cloud and data center traffic – consumer connections to data centers and interconnection between data centers – will increase more than 440 percent by 2017.
- Combined, video and data center traffic are the key drivers to the overall forecast increase of 560 percent traffic growth in the metro.
- Total Metro traffic will grow approximately two times faster than traffic going into the backbone network by 2017.
- By 2017, 75 percent of total traffic will terminate within the metro network and 25 percent of traffic will traverse the backbone network as video, data and web content is increasingly sourced from within metro networks.
The 12-page paper is online.