Why Broadband Changes Everything

According to the study, the average broadband connection is now generating 14.9 GB of Internet traffic per month, up 31 percent from last year when it was 11.4 GB per month. And while a majority of this traffic is coming from online video â€"- streaming not P2P -â€" the trends show that we are using the Internet for more than just that. Give us more speed and we will use it all. And then we’ll want more of it.

The daily usage of the Internet

Communication services such as Skype only increase the daily usage of the Internet. Add to the mix addictive sites like Facebook, Zynga and Groupon, and you can see that the Internet is becoming deeply embedded in our lives.

There is an interesting dynamic of the web â€"- the peak traffic -â€" that is equivalent of prime time on television. Peak-hour Internet traffic is 72 percent higher than Internet traffic during an average hour. In an average day, Internet “prime time” ranges from approximately 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. (for the local time zone) around the world.

The rapid growth of VoIP ?

Earlier this morning I wrote about the rapid growth of VoIP ?- 112 million broadband connections with VoIP attached to them. Today, voice and video communications traffic (such as voice over IP [VoIP] and voice and video over instant messaging) has reached 2 percent of all traffic, up from less than 1 percent last year. Here are some interesting voice & video communication-related data points:

Cisco is predicting that video calling will exceed 1 percent of consumer internet traffic by end of 2010. I bet Apple's FaceTime is only going to help achieve that goal. In summary, I think all these numbers can be tied to my initial assertion: Broadband is the magical driver of all things on the Internet. Thanks to broadband, everything, including the web, changes.