According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) Complete Forecast released in June 2017 global IP traffic is expected to increase three-fold and to reach 278 exabytes per month by 2021 (up from 96 exabytes per month in 2016).  IP traffic is also expected to reach an annual run rate of 3.3 zettabytes by 2021 (up from an annual run rate of 1.2 zettabytes in 2016).

First of all this trend is explained by the predicted acceleration of the economy digital transformation and the information society development. This is primarily indicated by the following: 

• the projected increase in Internet users—from 3.3 to 4.6 billion or 58 percent of the global population;
• greater adoption of personal devices and machine-to-machine (M2M) connections—from 17.1 billion to 27.1 billion from 2016- 2021;
• IoT innovations in connected home, connected healthcare, smart cars/transportation and a host of other next-generation M2M services are driving this incremental growth—a 2.4-fold increase from 5.8 billion in 2016 to 13.7 billion by 2021;
• average broadband speed advances—from 27.5 Mbps to 53.0 Mbps, and more video viewing—from 73 percent to 82 percent of total IP traffic.

Globally, IP traffic will reach 35 Gigabytes per capita in 2021, up from 13 Gigabytes per capita in 2016.

Wi-Fi and mobile-connected devices will generate 73 percent of Internet traffic by 2021.  Internet access percentages will be the following: Wi-Fi - 53; cellular - 20;  fixed - 27.

Беспроводными и мобильными устройствами в 2021 году будет передаваться 63% от общего количества IP-трафика, что превысит аналогичный показатель для стационарных устройств (37%). В 2016 году на стационарные устройства приходилось 51% IP-трафика, на беспроводные и мобильные устройства – 49%.

Video will continue to dominate IP traffic and overall Internet traffic growth—representing 80 percent of all Internet traffic by 2021, up from 67 percent in 2016. Globally, there will be nearly 1.9 billion Internet video users (excluding mobile-only) by 2021, up from 1.4 billion in 2016. The world will reach three trillion Internet video minutes per month by 2021, which is five million years of video per month, or about one million video minutes every second.

Source: Cisco