It's Time to Stop Buying the Capacity Crisis Myth → Re: Spectrum crunch: not a problem today, but eventually

That depends on whether or not peak-hour usage will start tapering off before catching up with hardware capacity growth.

If you read Cisco VNI and other similar reports, some types of peak-hour usages such as video streaming grow by 50-60%/year. On the other hand, large routers's capacity/density/cost improve at a rate of about 25%/year.

Whether or not the exaflood will happen depends on whether or not demand will catch up with hardware's head-start before slowing down.

Story above pretty clearly highlights Cisco's predictions are inflated. Two guesses why. One should be "to sell hardware."

Try looking around for companies that publish statistics about their usage growth that go into comparisons between average and peak traffic growth, they all agree with numbers similar to Cisco's... 30-35%/year average, 50-60% peak.

You do not need to believe Cisco, Sandvines, Akamai or anybody else, just visit the statistics pages from any internet exchange, they all show similar trends as well.

Here are the stats page from two of the largest internet exchanges in the world:
»www.ams-ix.net/statistics/
»www.hkix.net/hkix/stat/a ··· ate.html

That 50-60% does not only exist in Cisco's and other equipment manufacturers' papers, it also exists in the real world.