I came across an amazing statistic in the paper recently – the article stated that by 2013, (that’s just three years away), global consumer internet data traffic would exceed 32,000 exabytes per month. At the time, I didn’t actually know what an exabyte was, but it sounded impressive. And as it turns out, it is: an exabyte is actually a billion gigabytes, and as you probably know, a gigabyte is a billion bytes of data. So we’re talking about more than 32,000 billion, billion bytes of data.  That’s 32 billion trillion, or to put it another way, 32,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of data – per month!

The demand is clear – it’s driven by millions of users of new, bandwidth-hungry applications on their mobile devices, PCs, and home entertainment systems – and it’s going to keep growing. So how exactly are service providers going to deal with such a massive amount of data?

An ability to predict the future would help (at least as far as data capacity demand is concerned). And the more accurately service providers can do this, the more efficient and competitive they will become. That’s because it’s simply too expensive to over-engineer the network in advance of the demand curve, and too late to try and catch up by adding the network resources after demand has already grown. Service providers need planning tools that can “look both ways” – back in history to see and understand the trends in demand that have taken place, and also into the future to predict the required resources needed in the next 6 or 12 months, “just in time”, in line with demand as it grows.

The communications world is changing faster than we can imagine and the winners are going to be those who have the right vision and strategy to plan ahead and build the networks we need to handle all those exabytes...