Internet traffic will reach 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes by 2015

According to the forecast made by Cisco within the framework of its Visual Networking Index global Internet traffic will grow four-fold by 2015 to 966 exabytes a year, or a zettabyte (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) while the number of devices connected to the Internet will increase to 15 billion.

Suraj Shetty, Cisco's vice president of global service provider marketing, predicts that the average resident of the United States will have 7 networked devices in 2015 while in 2010 there was one connected device for every human on the planet.

The Cisco report says that in 2010 PCs generated about 97% of the Internet traffic while within the next four years the share will decrease to 85% because people will be more likely using smartphones, tablets and TV sets to browse the web. Thus, the number of networked devices will be 2 times higher than the population of the Earth. The growth in traffic will largely be driven by online video and new devices such as tablets, Shetty said.

Besides, Cisco researchers also forecast that in 2015 people will be browsing the Internet via wireless devices more than via wired devices with the ration of 54% to 46%.

Cisco predicted that global broadband speeds would increase from about 7 Mbps to 28 Mbps, but Carlos Rodriguez, manager of regulatory affairs at Telefónica USA, said the speed increases will depend on several factors. Customers are demanding more bandwidth, but many telecom carriers' revenues have been flat or declining, he said.

"We can't take investment ... for granted," he said. "There is a risk at some point that cost will surpass revenues."