In its annual the planners at Cisco Systems make it clear that they foresee stunning growth in traffic over digital networks in the coming five years. As the name “Visual Network Index” implies, Cisco expects video services to PCs, TVs and mobile devices will play a major role in fueling a four-fold increase in data traffic over global networks in 2014. The company’s expectation for video over the Internet was distilled into the following, mind-boggling observation, “It would take over two years to watch the amount of video that will cross global IP networks every second in 2014. It would take 72 million years to watch the amount of video that will cross global IP networks during calendar year 2014.”

But achieving video’s manifest destiny only accounts for a fraction of the growth that Cisco expect two see in demand for the broadband internet. In a WebEx-based conference Cisco execs Tom Barnett and Arielle Sumits also addressed themes they had woven into a companion study called piece “Hyperconnectivity and the Approaching Zettabyte Era.” The concept of hyperconnectivity is constructed on three tenets. One is that people will be multitasking on multiple devices in multiple modes. Second is that there will be several passive applications (they use a “Nanny Cam” as a prototype) which will use bandwidth as a matter of course, without directly taking up a person’s time in the real world. Those two factors, in effect, expand the number of hours in a digital day.

A third bandwidth-hogging factor is growth in popularity of HD video. The preference for clearer pictures on screens of all sizes accelerates the need for more bandwidth. HD has also become the preferred presentation format for internet-based distribution of video that can originate from Flip cameras (a Cisco product), “shared” across peer-to-peer networks like BitTorrent, retrieved from indexed services like YouTube, accessed in real-time from the likes of JustinTV or distributed in “locked down” or managed fashion by rights holders (like ABC Family), programing services (Netflix) or the TV Networks (ABC Family, Hulu).

It is no surprise that Cisco is pursuing a highly bandwidth intensive future. The explosive growth in video across networks, devices, applications and modalities creates high levels of expectation for its largest switches and routers to be embedded in both public and private networks. What’s fascinating is that the rate of growth for video pales in comparison with wireless data services, which Cisco expects to more than double in every year during the forecast period (a compounded annual growth rate of 108 percent) so that the the 3.6 exabytes used monthly by mobile subscribers is 39 times the levels seen this year (all this growth in spite of the fact that Cisco’s planners had foreseen the sort of bandwidth cap or metering that AT&T recently proposed to replace its “all-you-can-eat” mobile data plans.

Netflix was something of a poster child for the growth of the Visual Network. By creating IP-based channels for video delivery to cable boxes, game devices, PCs and even iPads, Netflix has shown the way to support subscriber-driven migration from physical delivery (through those red envelopes in the mail) to on-demand across a multiplicity of platforms. It’s a coup for the customers that is supported by the advent of more capacious IP-based networks, cheaper storage “in-the-cloud” and faster processors on all sorts of devices, including mobile. It invokes several of the principles underlying Recombinant Communications (RC) because it transforms existing hardware (TVs, PCs, Games) into controllers and displays for video entertainment.

And for those who try to keep score at home, a zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes.

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Tags: Cisco, Recombinant Communications, IP Networks