48 hours in a day ?: Exponentially increasing active multi-tasking vs. passive networking

[Sarbajit Roy (testing)]

A 2009 whitepaper set from Cisco on "Hyperconnectivity and the approaching Zettabyte era" says

"It is passive networking more than multitasking that allows the growth of traffic to outpace any change in behavior. ..For every hour of an Internet user’s day, there are over 2 hours of P2P traffic, and over 1.5 hours of HTTP traffic. .. There are currently 36 hours in a network day. By 2013, there will be almost two days in a network day."

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/ns827/VNI_Hyperconnectivity_WP.pdf
with its companion
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/ns827/white_paper_c11-481360.pdf

(page 6..7)
"Active Multitasking Finds Its Way to the Network

Multitasking has long been recognized as facet of human behavior in business, social, and private environments. Academic research indicates that one-fifth of all waking hours are spent multitasking and for information workers,
one-half of work hours are multitasked.

Little by little, each of the multitasked activities finds its way onto the network. There are many example of multitasking where both the primary and secondary tasks are online:

● Listening to online music while working online
● Instant messaging or microblogging while participating in a virtual meeting
● Watching VoD while paying bills online
● Monitoring RSS feeds while watching online videos
● Web browsing and instant messaging while talking on the phone
● Listening to the audio of a video presentation, sports, or current events running in the background while working on a main task

In the last example, the number of video minutes crossing the network can greatly exceed the number of video minutes the consumer watches. The video tags along with the audio, commanding attention periodically, but largely staying in the background. This type of multitasking could potentially have a large impact on Internet traffic: If every audio minute were a video minute, a consumer’s video consumption would rise by 60 percent. In other words, a consumer who watches 4 hours of video per day might generate 6 hours of video traffic per day.

A similar example is a consumer who views video in the background from a “nannycam” or “petcam,” known as “ambient video,” while word processing.

Passive Networking Creates Constant Online Awareness
“Passive networking” means that connectivity pervades the background as well as the foreground. Examples of
passive networking are:
● Online backup
● Software updates
● Internet PVR
● Ambient video (nannycam, petcam, securitycam, etc.)

With multicore computing, online backups and software updates can occur in the background without adversely affecting the performance of the active applications. Users may set up media recorders to capture content for more than the number of hours that they actually watch. Software updates already routinely make appearances in charts of top traffic generators on service provider networks.

It is passive networking more than multitasking that allows the growth of traffic to outpace any change in behavior. For every hour of an Internet user’s day, there are over 2 hours of P2P traffic, and over 1.5 hours of HTTP traffic. The latter is due to multitasking, while the former is due to passive networking. P2P was the first ambient application. Overall, Cisco estimates that passive networking creates 75 minutes of traffic for every hour of network use, adding another six hours per day on top of the 6 hours that result from multitasking. There are currently 36 hours in a network day. By 2013, there will be almost two days in a network day."

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