The forewarned flood will come - but it will not be water....

We will be drowning in DATA...

The growing world population combined with an increasing number of smart devices, faster broadband speeds, more Internet videos and growth in WiFi connections will see global Internet traffic surge, Cisco predicts. And rightly so...

By 2016, global IP traffic will hit 1.3 zettabytes a year, nearly four times its 2011 level. Which is more than an early prediction i.e. only of a couple of months ago.

One zettabyte equals 1 billion terabytes. As of 2009, the entire Internet contained about half a zettabyte, or 500 exabytes, of information.

Consumer videos will be the major driver of growth, Cisco predicted.

By 2016, 56 exabytes of Internet traffic a month will go over WiFi, Cisco projected. That's over half the world's total Internet traffic.

Cisco's predictions might be conservative. "Every time we make these projections, the entire industry has been wrong," Jim McGregor, president of Tirias Research, told TechNewsWorld. "The applications and the market are still growing much faster than anyone could have imagined." Which is why when we chatted to Dave the Futurist last year - the numbers were different (a lot less - and still scary!)

By 2016, Cisco forecasts that there will be nearly 19 billion connections, as the proliferation of mobile devices and machine-to-machine links drives up demand for connectivity. That's about 2.5 connections for every person on the planet, almost double the 2011 total of 10.3 billion connections. This IS the internet of everything folks - this is BIG DATA.

There will be 3.4 billion Internet users by 2016, Cisco expects. That's about 45 percent of the global population projected by United Nations estimates.

Fixed broadband speeds will almost quadruple, from 9 Mbps in 2011 to 34 Mbps in 2016, Cisco predicts. About 1.2 million minutes' worth of video will shunt across the Internet every second. There will be about 1.5 billion Internet video users by 2016, nearly twice the 792 million racked up in 2011.

Global P2P traffic in 2016 will account for 54 percent of global consumer Internet file-sharing traffic. That's almost 30 percent lower than the 77 percent of global sharing traffic P2P accounted for in 2011. However, the actual amount of P2P traffic will increase from 4.6 exabytes a month in 2011 to 10 exabytes a month by 2016.

"Let's hope that the network continues to grow robustly," Tirias' McGregor said. "We really don't know the potential impact of external factors such as a period of high solar activity. Nature and other external factors have a funny way of causing havoc when you least expect it."

So solar flares - predicted for the end of this year - a transit of venus - a flood of data - it could be more than interesting come the end of the year... and epoch.