The number of internet connected devices is set to explode in the next four years to over 15 billion - twice the world's population by 2015. Technology giant Cisco predicts the proliferation of tablets, mobile phones, connected appliances and other smart machines will drive this growth. The company said consumer video will continue to dominate internet traffic. It predicts that by 2015, one million minutes of video will be watched online every second. The predictions come from Cisco's fifth annual forecast of upcoming trends. Cisco's Visual Networking Index also estimated that at the same time more than 40% of the world's projected population will be online, a total of nearly three billion people. The networking giant forecast that by 2015 internet traffic will reach 966 exabytes a year. An exabyte is equal to one quintillion bytes. In 2004, global monthly internet traffic passed one exabyte for the first time. But Cisco said alongside this quadrupling of traffic comes a number of very real concerns. "What you are seeing is this massive growth in devices, the way devices are being used and are connected to the internet and what users expect them to do," said Suraj Shetty, Cisco vice president for global marketing. Read more here:- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13613536
Yes and it will only explode to that level when IPV6 becomes commonplace otherwise under IPV4 all these devices are going to be behind NAT and firewalls (IPV6 and IPV4 are the protocol specifications for internet addressing) there are only 4 billion odd unique public addresses available with IPV4 with IPV6 the number is so great as to be for practical purposes infinite Also already just the servers alone on the internet account for something like 2% of the total energy usage of the entire planet
There's no way that 15 billion devices can be connected publicly to the current internet because there aren't enough addresses to do it, each device needs a minimum of 1 address and there are only 4 billion or so available. You can increase the number of connected devices by hiding them behind NAT which is Network Address translation a method that allows a device on a private network to access the public internet, that's what your Wireless Router at home is doing right now, you have one IP address but maybe a laptop and a desktop computer attached on your private network but you only use one public address. Now IPV6 does away with all the limitations but it is not fully adopted yet and there is a lot of structural change that needs to be implemented to make it a much more pervasive technology, IPV6 has so many addresses that your could have a trillion connected devices and it would still be using less than a tiny fraction of the total available addresses 2 to the power 128 unique addresses on IPV6 (or something like that). IPV6 means that every device be it a phone or a laptop or internet connected refrigerator or even your internet connected car will be uniquely identifiable from it's assigned IP address at any one time, at the moment if you are behind NAT you can always argue that it wasn't your computer that clicked on a dodgy terrorist information site, it might have been the wife's laptop instead but in future whatever address has been allocated to your PC will identify it at that time and place (even if the address is auto allocated because you used a public network for example) of course the traceability of addresses is dependant on the issuer recording when, where and for how long the address was issued and relating that to the actual device that requested the address. It's a complex subject and I should say I am no expert on IPV6 although I know a lot about the existing IPV4 system. Basically IPV6 is the future of the internet.
