Cisco Visual Networking Index Usage research is geared towards measuring the effects of visual networking like videos, social networking and advanced collaboration applications.

The Cisco Visual Networking Index Usage underscores the space occupied by activities involving videos this year. According to the study, 14.9 GB of internet traffic per month is generated by average broadband connections. The figure is 31% higher at 11.4GB compared to last year. “Busy hour” traffic grew by 41% from last year, and is 72% higher than average hour while peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing went down to 25% of the global internet traffic from 38% last month. This is surpassed by online videos which includes flash, internet videos and internet TV at 26%.

Over one-third of the top 50 sites by volume are video sites, covering videos from gaming consoles, Internet TV, short-form user-generated videos, commercial video downloads and video distributed via content delivery networks. Also none of the top 50 global sites featured explicit adult content, a major shift from two years ago. Top 10 of the 50 sites features software updates and download.

Compared to data communications traffic like email, instant messaging and instant messaging file transfers, voice and video communication traffic is 6-fold higher. Moreover, it fluctuates more than file-sharing traffic. Interestingly, only 1% of broadband connections is responsible of the internet’s 20% of traffic. Traffic prime time normally ranges from 9am to 1am globally.

“Video will be a ‘road hog’ in terms of usage bandwidth but not the majority of traffic in terms of kinds of content flowing in the ‘pipes,'” says John Furrier.  “Video is the future and the most underdeveloped content type on the Internet.  It’s just the beginning for video.  It’s still early stages.”

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