IP networks will feel traffic pain in 2009

Many are concerned about cell phone networks getting overwhelmed on Tuesday during the U.S. presidential inauguration.

Cell phone networks are built to be oversubscribe d--using statistical analysis to bet against a certain of users flooding a network all at the same time. While it's never been a fool-proof strategy, it's worked reasonably well until recently when smartphones and bandwidth modifier applications have mo ved to changeful devices.

But radiophone networks aren't the exclusive networks starting to get overwhelmed.Cisco Systems says that in 2012 Internet video traffic alone will be 400 times the traffic carried by the U.S. Internet backbone in 2000. Video-on-demand, IPTV, peer-to-peer (P2P) video, and Net video are forecast to account for nearly 90 percent of all consumer IP traffic in 2012.

"Cisco VNI projections indicate t hat IP traffic will increase at a combined annual growth rate (CAGR) of 46 percent from 2007 to 2012, nearly doubling every two years. This will result in an annual bandwidth demand on the world's IP networks of approximately 522 exabytes2, or more than half a zettabyte."

With this and the continued growth of converged networks within enterprise environments, the thought of the simple data network is no more. Networks have become highly structure and distributed, tasking companies with the ne ed to scale to monitor and analyze all aspects of the Voice, Video and IPTV.

The web that has become overwhelmed in 2008 will become incredibly burdened in 2009 and beyond if companies do not manage their bandwidth.

This seemed a little out there to me so I asked Tim McCreery, CEO of WildPackets, a developer of cloth and application analysis solutions for a bit more on what happens succeeding. (Not surprisingly, Tim's suggestions just so happen to support the thesis behind his company.)

First off, we'll see the growth of 10Gb networks, already rapidly becoming the mainstay for backbones within enterprise and service provider networks. 100Gb will be adopted at a faster pace because anythi ng less won't be able handle the traffic fill.

We'll also see the trend of companies moving their network reasoning tools to a Web-based approach, proving extreme flexibility in data access and information reporting, coupled with an emphasis on turn-key hardware-software monitoring solutions for their converged voice, video, Internet Protocol television, and aggregation networks.

Most importantly, with this continued growth and the popularity of obvious, over-taxed networks, it will be come ever more important for companies to know and understand exactly how well their networks are performing and resolve potential problems quickly--before they become a network-wide issues.

Cheers~