The FIFA World Cup is going to shatter internet traffic records, according to Cisco’s State of the Internet Report.
The global soccer tournament, which begins this week, is predicted to generate a mind-boggling 4.3 exabytes of IP traffic. That’s the same amount of traffic the entire country of Brazil (the World Cup’s host country) generates in three months.
What’s more, Cisco claims that the mobile traffic generated by 60,000 people in a soccer stadium will surpass the busy-hour traffic of Brazil’s 94 million smartphone users. This isn’t as shocking because most Brazilian smartphone are more likely to get online for messaging, whereas visiting soccer fans will be uploading and viewing large image and video files.
The Cisco report then breaks down future internet usage in terms we can understand: watching the World Cup and streaming HBO’s “Game of Thrones.”
The company predicts 132 exabytes of traffic by 2018, which it claims is equivalent to:
- 8.8 billion people streaming the World Cup final (on 4K HDTVs) simultaneously
- 5.5 billion people watching Season 4 of “Game of Thrones” in HD simultaneously
- 4.5 trillion YouTube clips
In case you wanted to break down that data in measurable terms, that’s 940 quadrillion text messages. Current projections put the world population at around 7.5 billion by 2018, so using the entire internet to watch the 2018 World Cup seems out of reach.
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