Cisco: IoT traffic is taking over; 5G, WiFi 6 are ascending

If the industry needed more evidence that IoT devices and applications are taking over the world, Cisco this week said that by 2023 machine-to-machine communications will make up 50% or about 14.7 billion of all networked connections compared to 33% (6.1 billion) in 2018 and 3.1 percent in 2017. The M2M findings were just a part of Cisco's annual forecast of networking trends now called the Cisco Annual Internet Report. The report replaces the Visual Networking Index (VNI) Forecast and looks at everything from 5G and Wi-Fi growth to broadband trends collected from actual network traffic reports and independent analyst forecasts. On the M2M projections, Cisco stated the rapid growth is due to a variety of hot M2M applications, such as smart meters, video surveillance, healthcare monitoring, transportation and package tracking. Traffic is growing faster than the number of connections because the use of video applications on M2M connections is up, as well as other high-bandwidth, low-latency applications such as telemedicine and smart-car navigation systems.