Nokia predicts huge WAN traffic growth, but experts question assumptions

The latest Nokia Global network traffic report forecasts a big uptick in traffic owing to three converging forces, two of which include an enterprise focus: artificial intelligence and an expansion in industrial operations across the WAN. How much those assumptions match realities on the ground is up for discussion.

Consumer-oriented traffic remains the largest share of global WAN traffic, and Nokia also sees large increases there as consumers shift to “more immersive, interactive and increasingly uplink-heavy uses.” Overall, the report predicts WAN traffic to increase between 300% and 700% through 2034, with video accounting for by far the largest share – at or near 60%.

While that makes intuitive sense, the report also predicts tremendous leaps in AI traffic, with a compound annual growth rate of 23%, ultimately representing 30% of global WAN traffic by 2034. That figure covers all AI uses, including consumer, enterprise, and industrial. In all, AI “becomes the primary growth engine over the forecast period.”

Industrial traffic will likewise see significant growth, with Nokia predicting a CAGR of 5% for internet of things (IoT) traffic and 50% for extended reality (XR) traffic between 2024 and 2034.

But the report is short on details on the applications that will drive that growth, says Tom Nolle, founder and principal analyst of the research and consulting firm Andover Intel. “There has to be a correlation between the traffic of the future and the applications of the future,” Nolle says. “If you don’t talk about applications, I can’t validate what you’re talking about as a traffic forecast. If I use my own assumptions on applications, then [the Nokia] numbers don’t validate.”

Nokia WAN traffic report highlights

Nokia’s report modeled traffic in three domains:

• Consumer , which includes both mobile access and fixed access, including fixed wireless access.
• Enterprise and industrial , which covers wide-area connectivity that supports knowledge work, automation, machine vision, robotics coordination, field support, and industrial IoT.
• AI , including applications that people directly invoke, such as assistants, copilots, and media generation, as well as autonomous use cases in which AI systems trigger other AI systems to perform functions and move data across networks.

The report outlines three scenarios: conservative, moderate, and aggressive. “Our goal is to present scenarios that fall within a realistic range of possible outcomes, encouraging stakeholders to plan across the full spectrum of high-impact demand possibilities,” the report says.

Nokia’s prediction for global WAN traffic growth ranges from a 13% CAGR for the conservative scenario to 16% CAGR for moderate and 22% CAGR for aggressive. Looking more closely at the moderate scenario, it’s clear that consumer traffic dominates. Enterprise and industrial traffic make up only about 14% to 17% of overall WAN traffic, although their share is expected to grow during the 10-year forecast period.

“On the consumer side, the vast majority of traffic by volume is video,” says William Webb, CEO of the consulting firm Commcisive. Asked whether any of that consumer traffic is at some point served up by enterprises, the answer is a decisive “no.” It’s mostly YouTube and streaming services like Netflix, he says. In short, that doesn’t raise enterprise concerns.

Nokia predicts AI traffic boom

AI is a different story.

“Consumer- and enterprise-generated AI traffic imposes a substantial impact on the wide-area network (WAN) by adding AI workloads processed by data centers across the WAN. AI traffic does not stay inside one data center; it moves across edge, metro, core, and cloud infrastructure, driving dense lateral flows and new capacity demands,” the report says.

An explosion in agentic AI applications further fuels growth “by inducing extra machine-to-machine (M2M) traffic in the background,” Nokia predicts. “AI traffic isn’t just creating more demand inside data centers; it’s driving a sustained surge of traffic between them. AI inferencing traffic—both user-initiated and agentic-AI-induced M2M—moving over inter-data-center links grows at a 20.3% CAGR through 2034.”

Enterprise and industrial AI traffic will grow even faster, at a CAGR of 48%, reaching 101 exabytes per month by 2034, Nokia predicts. “Growth is driven by AR applications adoption, agentic-AI-powered industrial automation, agentic AI assistants, and increasing use of sensor data in AI applications,” the Nokia report says. “While traditionally uplink-heavy, enterprise AI traffic is expected to shift toward downlink dominance in the next decade, led by immersive AI applications.”

Exactly what those applications are the report doesn’t say, but Nolle doesn’t see them on the horizon. He talks to some 600 enterprises per year, maybe 100 of which are “really pushing technology boundaries.” To date, none are concerned about an inability to achieve their objectives due to constraints in WAN bandwidth, he says.

“If I say to a CIO, ‘Your VPN traffic is going to go up 30% because of AI,’ he would tell me it was nonsense,” Nolle says.

Nokia also points to an increased use of augmented and extended reality (AR and XR) applications as WAN traffic drivers. Some companies are putting AR/VR and XR applications to good use, such as for training for dangerous situations, Webb says. “But volume of devices is so small that the data generated is really insignificant globally,” he says.

Industrial applications as a traffic booster

Global enterprise and industrial traffic, including fixed wireless access, will also steadily rise over the next decade, “as more operations, machines, and workers become digitally connected,” Nokia predicts. “Pervasive automation, high-resolution video, AI-driven analytics, and remote access to industrial systems,” will drive traffic growth.

“Factory lines are streaming machine vision data to the cloud. AI copilots are assisting personnel in real time. Field teams are using AR instead of manuals. Robots are coordinating across sites,” the Nokia report says. “Industrial systems are continuously sending telemetry over the WAN instead of keeping it on-site. This shift makes wide-area connectivity part of the core production workflow.”

Webb struggles to envision scenarios such as robots communicating between factories. While robots would certainly coordinate within a factory, “I can’t imagine factories being so tightly coupled that a robot in one factory is in milliseconds changing its behavior based on a robot in another factory,” he says. Factories may well send some data outside their walls, but it’s typically telemetry data and the like that is not a significant bandwidth driver.

Nolle agrees. “Let’s suppose there’s this huge pent-up demand for cross-site coordination of IoT industrial process information. If that were true, we should see a lot of applications that are pushing the limits of the current constraints,” he says. “Enterprises aren’t telling me anything like that.”

Most factories do already have some degree of IoT automation, so it’s not hard to imagine growth in the sector, but it’s not likely to happen very quickly, Nolle says. The average depreciation time for an industrial component is more than 15 years, so much of the residual value of industrial machinery is still underappreciated. Replacing it would mean writing it off and taking “a huge financial hit,” Nolle says. “Any company that tried to do it would be trashed on Wall Street.”

While it’s interesting to see predictions from big industry players, it’s important to consider the source. As a major supplier to telecom companies, Nokia has a vested interest in growth in WAN usage. So, its predictions should be taken with a grain of salt, Webb says. “We are sadly missing a really good, authoritative, independent source of worldwide traffic forecasts,” he says.