Not sure why this should surprise anyone. It's been discussed that the network rate would be inreasing a lot, in lumps, over the next few months. Who it comes from, to me, isn't that important, because there's lots of vendors out there working on their gear, getting it out the door, and not all of them are as public about it. My projections from a few months back are a little off because 2 of the vendors I've talked to are a little behind.
Im not at all surprised at the overall trend, Ive been expecting 10+PH by years end since this spring. Its just the increase this particular difficulty interval that is taking me by surprise. The increase is significantly larger than either KnC batches at a time no one is known to be shipping high volume / high hashrate products.
Still, the hashrate is going to skyrocket this quarter as long as the other chips fall into place. Q2 will be worse if my longterm predictions are close.
Percentage wise, I doubt it. I think the steepest increase will be the first two or three months of 2014. After that I expect we will begin to approach a more linear growth. Anyway, thats for the mining speculation subforum I guess.