Ken Morse, Cisco’s CTO, along with his colleague Guillaume de Saint Marc, senior director, new initiatives, updated IBC delegates on the huge growth in connected devices – not least the ‘Internet of Everything’ and Machine to Machine – in terms of bandwidth demands.
“It’s explosive growth,” said Morse. “As we extrapolate what’s happening now, we can see a future with 50 billion connected devices by 2020. That’s about eight for every person on the planet. Combine this with the growth we are seeing in video delivered to mobile devices, where we see two-thirds of the world’s data traffic expected to be video – and that’s by 2015.”
Morse cut through much of the jargon associated with the technology, and helped translate the forecasts into what delivers “ease and convenience for us as consumers, and how service providers will manage the demand and monetise what’s available.
“We are also seeing the impact of the Cloud, and what we are now calling the ‘Inter-Cloud’, and how operators can tap into analytics to really benefit from the assembled data and manage the exponential growth that we expect.”
Morse delivered a list of the likely impacts, both in terms of growth opportunities but also potential cost savings that could be achieved in operating processes and improved yields “and ultimately making things better for everyone down the value chain. Even last year it has been estimated that $500 billion had been left on the table in terms of lost opportunity in this space.”
