Middle East experiences max growth in IP Traffic

As per the 11th annual Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) forecast for 2015 to 2020, the Middle East and Africa region will see a 6-fold growth in IP traffic, which will be the highest at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 41% by 2020.The MEA region will also see 445 million new Internet users by 2020 at a CAGR of 10.8%.

The internet traffic in the MEA region will be 527x the volume of the entire internet in the region in 2005.The Mobile data traffic is set to grow 15-fold from 2015 to 2020, a CAGR of 71%, that is, 2 times faster growth than fixed IP traffic. The Mobile data traffic will account for 40%of total IP traffic in 2020.

Video services and content services which continue to dominate all other applications is set to maintain its upward trend both globally and in the MEA regions. In the MEA region, the IP video traffic is predicted to grow 8- fold from 2015 to 2020, a CAGR of 52%. The Total Internet Video Traffic (business and consumer combined) will be 79% of all the internet traffic in 2020, up from 59%in 2015, of which, approx. 39% of internet video traffic will be HD and 3% will be Ultra HD.

Even in the arena of Internet Gaming, traffic will grow 8-fold and will be 2% of the consumer internet traffic in 2020.By 2020, there will be approx. 1.5 networked devices per capita, 77% of which will be mobile connected. M2M modules will account for 22 % of all the networked devices. Cisco VNI forecasts also predicts that by 2020, 21% of IP traffic will be generated by PC’s (vs 67% in2015), 4% by TVs ,60% by smartphones (up from 20% in2015),12% by tablets ,2.4% by M2M modules. An Average fixed broadband speed will grow 2.4-fold from 2015 to 2020, from 7Mbps to 16.5 Mbps. The Average mobile connection speed will grow 6-fold and will reach 5 Mbps by 2020.

“One of the most significant changes of the next few years will be the dramatic increase in worldwide connectivity via the Internet. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident that across the Middle East and Africa where we are looking at the highest growth rate in the world with 2.4 billion new devices and connections to be added by 2020,” said Mike Weston, Vice President, Cisco Middle East.” The rapid increase in connected devices and IP traffic will create new opportunities that arise from digitization, delivering benefits such as reduced costs, increased efficiency and improvement in the lives of citizens.”