Cisco this week released its Cisco Visual Networking Index Forecast and Methodology, 2007-2012 [PDF] and companion piece Approaching the Zettabyte Era [PDF], well-considered projections of where we're headed given the impact on the internet of visual networking applications.  They're well worth the read.

In an act of confident prognostication, they estimate that the annual run rate of IP traffic in 2012 will be 522 exabytes, more than half a zettabyte. This will no doubt be an interesting over-under bet at your favorite sports bar.  In this case, I'll bet on the over.

Why?  I'm listening to "Stumbling on Happiness", which describes how predictions of the future so often underestimate the mark by extrapolating from the present based on what we know, without much of a factor for the emergence of the "Black Swan", or the things that we can't possible imagine happening in the next few years. We don't know what they'll be, but we should at least assume that something unanticipated will come along.

If I had to pick one of the internals from Cisco's prediction to support my bet on the over, it would be their category of "Internet Gaming", where they lump in “multiplayer virtual world gaming”. There is discussion about underlying factors and assumptions in gaming's use of bandwidth bandwidth, but I think the focus on “gaming” as the primary purpose of virtual environments underestimates the role of this kind of interface in future applications in many areas: business and commerce, education, government, entertainment. And while current bandwidth usage is moderated by how much of the virtual environment is actually created at the user’s computer, using lightweight communications with the virtual world servers, this will change. More integration with real-world data in the simulated world will demand higher real-time bandwidth consumption.

And for those of you wanting to know about exabytes and zettabytes, here’s a quick lesson from Cisco (and we haven’t even started talking about yottabytes yet!)

(Thanks to Christine Kerner for the link to the report, via Facebook)