According to a white paper published by Cisco, global IP traffic will grow 37% every year through 2011.

Cisco said that consumer IP traffic will surpass business IP traffic in 2008, surpassing 17 exabytes per month by 2011. The paper says that delivering “cable and IPTV video-on-demand content” will grow the fastest, surpassing consumer internet traffic.

I’m not sure how Cisco is figuring this since IPTV today is delivered over privately managed networks, not the public Internet. Do they expect IPTV to travel over the Internet in the future? Or are they using IPTV when they mean Internet video?

Just trying to understand what everyone means by IPTV is getting harder every day. The standard definition for IPTV is essentially Telco TV, or broadcast TV delivered over privately, managed networks like DSL or Fiber to the node or Fiber to the home.  Here in the U.S. that means projects like AT&T’s U-Verse and Verizon’s FiOSTV.

Cisco’s report was based on its own estimates, as well as projections from10 market research companies.

Anyway, some other tidbits from the paper:

• Internet video and downloads will grow from 9% of all consumer Internet traffic in 2006 to 30% in 2011.
• Internet traffic is growing fastest in developing markets, followed closely by Asia-Pacific.
• Internet video-to-TV will increase by more than a factor of 10 from 2007 to 2011.
• Internet video-to-PC will increase by a factor of four. Internet video-to-TV will exceed Internet video-to-PC by 2009, the Cisco study forecasts.

Bonus: Download the Cisco White Paper here. (PDF)