Carl Weinschenk speaks with Thomas Barnett, senior manager of service provider marketing for Cisco. The company released results from its Visual Networking Index.

Weinschenk: The new study complements the Cisco VNI Forecast and Methodology, 2008-2013. So let’s start with an overview of what that is.
Barnett: The VNI forecast is a methodology that several of our internal analysts put together in which we take independent forecasts from individual analysts and, based on usage patterns, forecast IP traffic and Internet growth for half a decade. We’ve had that access for the last three years. [It provides] a forward-leaning perspective.

Weinschenk: What is the Visual Networking Index?
Barnett: We wanted to have more of a snapshot, a look at what was going on with service-provider networks today. For over a year, we’ve been recruiting service-provider customers to share network data with us. What [the VNI] provides to us is a look at how people are using the Internet, using service-provider networks and some of the shifts from the pilot group. It involves more than 20 providers.

Weinschenk: What were some of the highlights?
Barnett: One was that peer-to-peer as a percentage of overall traffic has gone down. It still is a large amount of the traffic. Video, collaborative service and social networking increased to a point where they are over one-third of the traffic on average broadband connections. That is big news to us.

Weinschenk: Why?
Barnett: It is a shift in behaviors and how people are using the network. It is a shift in adoption rates and the willingness to use advanced services. In looking at Internet usage in general and comparing it to broadcast television, Internet usage from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. is growing from a whole host of application types, such as user-generated content, use of social-networking sites and sharing of data on the Internet as opposed to spending the time in front of the television.

Weinschenk: Peer-to-peer has been was the most newsworthy application for years. I guess it is a milestone that it is losing market share, so to speak.
Barnett: Even in our pilot test, over 50 percent of peak traffic was peer-to-peer. Now it is 38 percent. It has diminished in just a year by a significant amount. The actual [amount of peer-to-peer traffic] still is increasing, though it is decreasing as an overall percentage.

Weinschenk: What else did you find?
Barnett: Another key point is that the top 1 percent of subscribers are generating more than 20 percent of all the Internet traffic and the top 10 percent, are generating more than 60 percent of all the Internet traffic. It is interesting to note that during Internet prime time -- 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. -- about 25 percent of all the Internet traffic is generated.

Weinschenk: The study suggests that usage is exploding.
Barnett: To put in perspective a little … We thought it is interesting and made it the top level headline from the press release that the average broadband connection generates 11.4 gigabytes of Internet traffic per month. It’s a lot. That is the equivalent of 3,000 text e-mails a day. Mere mortals cannot go through all that. It is [the equivalent of] 100 MP3 music downloads or 360 text-only ebooks. So it’s a large amount of data that we are seeing coming through on a monthly basis. The insight wasn’t about peer-to-peer traffic as much as the growth of other advanced services. It is important to note that most of the broadband connections were residential traffic, with some small to medium-size business traffic.

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