A petabyte is big. So when we say that Internet users in the Asia Pacific region will generate almost 530,000 petabytes in 2015, that's a whole lot of data. One petabyte equals more than 1 million gigabytes. To put that in perspective, your computer's hard drive is probably capable of storing a few hundred gigabytes of information.
The region consumed about 67,000 petabytes in 2010, so if researcher Informa Telecoms & Media's predictions come true, that will be more than an eight-fold increase. Each Internet user in the region generated an average of 7.1GB per month in 2010, which is expected to rise to 31.2GB in 2015. Online will be the biggest reason for the spike, Informa said.
“Traffic in Asia Pacific is very much a tale of two regions. Developed Asia Pacific, which Informa defines as Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand, features countries with some of the fastest broadband infrastructure in the world. The rest of the region is much less developed in terms of infrastructure but, principally down to China and India, will be a huge contributor to traffic because of the sheer number of Internet users in the region," said Giles Cottle, principal analyst from Informa Telecoms & Media. “Asia Pacific is already the largest region for Internet traffic and by 2015 it will account for 42 percent of the world’s Internet traffic. Asia Pacific Developing in its own right will be the second biggest region, after North America, in 2015. Informa expects it to overtake the US in 2016."
More of Giles’ market analysis on Internet traffic in the APAC region is available here.
