Arielle Sumits

The scale of the Internet is awe-inspiring. By 2021, there will be 4.6 billion people and 27 billion devices connected to the Internet, and Internet traffic will reach 2.8 trillion Gigabytes (or 2.8 Zettabytes) per year. (These numbers are published in our annual Visual Networking Index.) Even with…

The Internet is global in spirit. But the traffic associated with it is increasingly local in nature, as we found in our recent VNI study. Consider a typical Internet user in North America. Today, over a third (35%) of the content accessed by this user is sent from a point within the same metropolit…

We recently released the annual update of the Cisco Mobile Visual Networking Index, 2016-2021. Mobile continues to be a highly dynamic space, with robust growth, and there are always a few surprises lurking in the numbers. I’d like to highlight a few of the numbers that struck me as particularly imp…

Inspired by Excelacom’s excellent and popular “What happens in an Internet minute” infographic, we’ve put together a nerdier version pertaining to data centers using data from our recent Global Cloud Index along with a few other figures. It’s just as impressive in our view, if a little more obscure.…

In the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, we witnessed the stunning and unexpected defeat of a methodology in addition to a candidate: poll-based election predictions. November 8, 2016 was a spectacular failure of poll-based predictions, fast on the heels of the spectacular failure of the poll-based p…

For the past year Americans have read about polling data almost daily, so the casual observer may be forgiven for thinking there are mountains and mountains of data being collected to help make sense of this year’s unusual election. The truth is, though, that polling data is not big data, either in…

Will the Internet continue to grow at historical rates, or has growth peaked? This was the question was posed by Sanjay Patel of CableLabs to the panelists on the Bandwidth Consumption Trends panel during the August 2016 CableLabs Summer conference. I was pleased to have been invited to participate…

We’re always on the lookout for the next big application to drive Internet traffic. When we see a type of traffic almost doubling in a year, we put it on our watch list. Below are five that topped our watch list based on the most recent Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) Complete Forecast. VIRTUA…

Cowritten with Usha Andra, Senior Analyst, Visual Networking Index, Service Provider Marketing 2016 marks the 10th anniversary of the VNI Mobile Forecast. For a decade, we have analyzed, reviewed, and made projections about mobile networking and how consumers and business users’ behaviors and expect…