The report by Cisco (link below) is short and has some interesting figures - even if you tend to disbelieve in these forecasts, there are some nice figures from 2007 (for example although p2p file sharing traffic grew its percentage decreased from 60% to 51% due to the increase in video traffic and also an increase of web-based file sharing in some regions).

Lots of work for network researchers ahead... ;)

IP traffic to 'double' every two years

Web traffic volumes will almost double every two years from 2007 to 2012, driven by video and web 2.0 applications, according to a report from Cisco Systems.. Increased use of video and social networking has created what Cisco calls 'visual networking', which is raising traffic volumes at a compound annual growth rate of 46 per cent.

Cisco's Visual Networking Index (PDF) predicts that visual networking will account for 90 per cent of the traffic coursing through the world's IP networks by 2012.

The upward trend is not only driven by consumer demand for YouTube clips and IPTV, according to the report, as business use of video conferencing will grow at 35 per cent CAGR over the same period.

Cisco reckons that traffic volumes will be measured in exabytes (one billion gigabytes) by 2012 and will reach 552 exabytes by that time.

in iTnews