According to Cisco, global IP traffic will skyrocket to a zettabyte -- or one trillion gigabytes -- by 2013, which is more than five times the amount of traffic today. Consumer IP traffic will account for a whopping 90 percent of the total, the company says.

Cisco also sees video leapfrogging mobile data traffic in the next four years, growing from 33 petabytes a month in 2008 to 2,184 petabytes (or 2 exabytes) a month in 2013. If true, that would mean mobile video would see a 131 percent annual growth rate.

Cisco, who bought the maker of the Flip video camera, certainly has a vested interest in seeing online video playing a bigger role, but potentially standing in the way of such a future is the increasing prominence of consumption based billing among ISPs. The future of broadband billing hasn't yet been decided as several ISPs continue to test market tiered consumption models.

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