Internet Traffic Growth
Global internet traffic reached an estimated ~5 zettabytes (5 × 10²¹ bytes) per year in 2024 — up from ~0.5 ZB in 2014. Video accounts for ~80% of consumer traffic. About 60–70% of all internet traffic flows through a handful of major content delivery networks (Akamai, Cloudflare, AWS CloudFront, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Netflix Open Connect).
Key insights
Video drives almost everything
Streaming video (Netflix, YouTube, TikTok, Disney+, live sports), video conferencing (Zoom, Teams, Meet) and video downloads together account for ~80% of consumer internet traffic. The 4K and 8K transition is gradual; bitrate efficiency improvements (H.265/HEVC, AV1) have partly offset higher resolutions. The pandemic-era surge in video conferencing has remained roughly half persistent.
The internet is more centralised than its founding myth suggests
A handful of CDNs deliver most of the traffic users actually receive. Akamai, Cloudflare, AWS, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Netflix between them touch the majority of consumer requests. Most 'internet' transit happens within or between these networks, not across the public backbone. Sandvine reports that on a typical residential connection, ~70% of bytes come from <20 sources.
Underlying capacity has grown faster than demand
Submarine cable capacity has roughly tripled every five years since 2015. New cables (Marea, 2Africa, JUPITER, GRACE Hopper, Topaz) add hundreds of Tbps each. Subsea bandwidth costs have collapsed; the binding constraint on internet performance is increasingly last-mile (fixed broadband, mobile coverage), not core capacity. The pandemic stress test in 2020 showed the backbone has substantial headroom.
Global IP traffic 2010–2024
Annual global internet traffic, exabytes
Key Finding: Roughly tripled every 3–4 years; sustained exponential growth.
Consumer internet traffic mix (2024)
% of downstream consumer traffic, fixed networks
Key Finding: Video alone is over three quarters of downstream consumer traffic.
Methodology & caveats
Measurement challenges
There is no single authoritative measure of global internet traffic — Cisco's annual report was the standard until 2020 when they discontinued it. Current estimates rely on TeleGeography (submarine cable capacity), Sandvine (residential network sampling), ISP and CDN disclosures, and IXP (internet exchange point) statistics. Numbers should be treated as well-informed estimates, not precise measurements.
CDN architecture
Content Delivery Networks replicate frequently-requested content at edge servers near users. A YouTube video is delivered from a server in your country, not from a Google data centre — that's why streaming feels instantaneous. CDNs collectively operate hundreds of thousands of edge POPs (points of presence). The trade-off: efficient content delivery but consolidation of traffic flow patterns.
Peering and transit
ISPs exchange traffic at internet exchange points (IXPs) under peering agreements (no money changes hands) or transit relationships (the smaller network pays the larger). Tier-1 ISPs (Lumen, Telia, Telxius, NTT) peer freely with each other. The 'flat' internet of the 1990s, where many small networks interconnected, has consolidated to a handful of mega-networks plus thousands of regional ones.