Cloud and Data Center Traffic will increase 440 Per Cent by 2017: A Study

According to the Bell Labs study titled, “Metro Network Traffic Growth: An Architecture Impact Study”,  released by Alcatel-Lucent, it has been revealed that the data traffic on metropolitan access and aggregation networks is set to increase by 560 per cent by 2017, driven by demand for video and the proliferation of data centers. Even more significantly, the study showed that by 2017 more than 75 per cent of that traffic will stay in metro networks, as compared to 57 per cent.

The study also indicates that traffic from video services will skyrocket by as much as 720 per cent and data center traffic will increase more than 440 per cent during the same time period. Combined, video and data centre traffic are the key drivers to the overall forecast increase of 560 per cent traffic growth in the metro.

Basil Alwan, Head of IP Routing and Transport for Alcatel-Lucent, said, This is the first traffic study to show the real impact of growth on operator networks. The move to cloud-optimized metro networks plays to Alcatel-Lucent’s core strengths of deploying massively scalable, efficient and agile networks. Moving forward, Alcatel-Lucent will continue to develop a more SDN-enabled IP and optical portfolio to allow networks to evolve even further into a virtualized environment.

Other key facts of the study reports that the total metro network traffic will increase 560 per cent by 2017 and will grow approximately two times faster than traffic going into the backbone network by 2017; Video traffic will increase 720 per cent by 2017 and by 2017, 75 per cent of the total traffic will terminate within the metro network and 25 per cent of traffic will traverse the backbone network as video, data and web content is increasingly sourced from within metro networks.