Web use set to surge as online views grow

Video is predicted to make up 87 per cent of all consumer internet traffic in New Zealand by 2018. Photo / Thinkstock

Kiwi households predicted to triple their internet usage by 2018.

New Zealand's internet traffic will grow almost threefold by 2018, according to forecasts, mostly driven by a sharp jump in the amount of television, movie and video content being watched online.

In a set of predictions published this month, networking company Cisco says the average New Zealand internet user will generate 43.8 gigabytes (GB) of internet traffic each month, up 168 per cent from 16.3GB in 2013.

The average household connected to the internet will generate 95.6GB of traffic per month. This is up 166 per cent from 2013, when households generated on average 35.9GB of traffic per month.

The driver of this growth, according to Cisco vice-president of global technology policy Robert Pepper, is a surge in connected devices, faster broadband speeds, and the amount of high-definition video being watched online.

"Driven by video, the data growth year-over-year across the world and in New Zealand is really dramatic ... people are consuming [video] on multiple screens and on ever-increasingly higher definition that are connected," Pepper said.

Video is predicted to make up 87 per cent of all consumer internet traffic in New Zealand by 2018, up from 75 per cent in 2013.

Internet connected televisions will account for 16.5 per cent of the 32 million networked devices predicted to be in the country by 2018.

Read the Cisco report here:

Ultra high definition televisions that consume nine times more data than standard-definition sets will account for 8 per cent of all flat-screen TVs by 2018.

The 32 million connected devices estimated to be in New Zealand in four years is almost twice as many as in 2013 and represents an average of about eight devices per internet user.

"You're looking at - for 4 million users on average - 8 devices per user. Almost half of those devices will be machine-to-machine [connections], but that's a huge amount of devices connected with internet protocol.

"A great example of machine-to-machine is the connected car ... they're going to monitor and give me an alert if my oil needs changing, if my tyre pressure is too low it will send me an alert, if the airbag goes off and I'm in a crash, I don't want the alert - I want it to go to the emergency services with my location," Pepper said.

Cisco New Zealand country manager Geoff Lawrie said the predictions "put New Zealand at the front of the curve" compared with global forecasts.

Average broadband speeds across mobile, fixed-line, residential and business customers will go from 16 megabits per second to 43 megabits per second in 2018, Cisco has predicted.