Are you ready for video on your corporate network?

I just saw this announcement from Cisco about their new ISP class router this morning.

Click here to read this press release

Cisco’s statistics include:

“(The potential throughput) enables the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress to be downloaded in just over one second; every man, woman and child in China to make a video call, simultaneously; and every motion picture ever created to be streamed in less than four minutes.”

Now that’s some throughput! But it falls in line with some statistics that I threw out at our last seminar on February 24 about Smart Business Architecture. I talked about the differences in how we configured networks last year vs. the considerations for 2010 and beyond. One third of the human cortex is dedicated to vision. A picture is a thousand words, Video says it all.

Because the traffic is exploding, and because it’s increasingly about interactive (and very high bandwidth) traffic, the Internet itself has to evolve. There is a lack of traffic management and the ability to allocate prioritized bandwidth to protect the user experience. The current situation is completely unlike what happened with voice—where people could just over-allocate bandwidth (voice is a very skinny app). Most of us will need a network upgrade comparable to an order of magnitude in capacity.

• 1 hour streaming video at standard resolution = 1Gb
• 1 hour streaming video at high def resolution = 5Gb+
• P2P traffic is already between 40-60% of total Internet traffic and it’s not even Interactive yet.
• 64% of communication is non-verbal.
• By 2013, 91% of all consumer IP traffic on the Internet will be video.
• By 2013, 36% of corporate WAN traffic will be video.
• In 2013, it will take ½ million years for one person to be able to watch the video generated in 1 month on the Internet.

As IT professionals, how are you guys building a network that will handle the requirements?

Let me know what you think.

Mahalo!