In October 2011, the ITU’s Broadband Commission for Digital Development set the target that basic broadband service should cost less than 5% of average monthly income in all countries worldwide by 2015. How many countries already make the grade? And what are prices like in the poorest parts of the world, where broadband could be the critical catalyst for meeting the Millennium Development Goals in areas like education and health? The results are mapped in this stylish video..
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CITI issues “Broadband in America – 2nd Edition” report #broadband
As it prepared the 2010 National Broadband Plan the FCC commissioned The Columbia Institute for Tele-Information (CITI) to write a report summarizing the state of broadband development in the USA. The report, entitled Broadband in America was delivered in November 2009. Now, in July 2011 CITI has issued a follow-up – Broadband in America – 2nd Edition. The 176 page document, which includes plenty of meaty research, maps the explosive growth of wireless service in the interim period plus other developments including:
- Advances in DSL, including ‘bonding’, will lead to speeds of up to 30mbps on copper.
- AT&T and Verizon aim to provide 50 million homes with 10 Mb/s wire line by 2013.
- Verizon expects to have 94% of the country covered by LTE – 10-12mbps – by 2013.
- AT&T, Verizon, and Quest currently have 5.3m FTTH subscribers, but there are another 770 FTTH ISPs collectively serving another 1.9m premises.
- When AT&T & Verizon finish deploying FIOS & U-Verse they will reach 40% of US households.
- DOCSIS 3.0 deployment is patchy.
- Broadband adoption will reach saturation at around 70% in 2014 with a split of 39% cable to 31% telco.
- 12% of U.S. households still use dial-up and 19% don’t use the Internet at all.
- Prices for wire line are expected to increase 2%/yr, and wireless up to 4%/yr.
- Investment runs at about $33b/yr, increasingly on wireless.
- Less than 50% of backbone capacity is being used.
The latter half of the report is taken up by guest essays, including
- Sharply contrasting views from Blair Levin and Eli Noam on the wire line vs wireless issue.
- Raul Katz gives detailed figures on the economic impact of rural broadband.
- D. Linda Garcia and Tarkan Rosenberg give a history lesson on the role of rural co-operatives in rolling out universal phone service, and then expound on the “diffusion model” as a means of getting through to that last 30% of holdouts.
- Bruce Lincoln gives a practical blueprint for such a diffusion model with his “Advancing Community Broadband” scheme, involving setting up wi-fi networks, plus telework/telehealth centers, in low-income neighborhoods.
Cisco predicts 400% growth in global IP traffic by 2015 #Internet #VNI
Cisco’s Virtual Networking Index, in a report Entering the Zettabyte Era (pdf) issued today Jun 1 2011, predicts that annual global IP traffic (Internet and non-Internet) will grow 400% by 2015 to reach 966 exabytes or nearly 1 zettabyte. The chart below represents Internet traffic.
Other predictions for 2015:
- There will be 3 billion global Internet users, with average bandwidth of 27mbps.
- The number of devices connected to IP networks will be twice as high as the global population.
- There will be 6 million Internet households worldwide generating over a terabyte per month in Internet traffic, up from just a few hundred thousand in 2010 (but most of them will be in Asia).
- Traffic from wireless devices will exceed traffic from wired devices.
- Peak traffic will be equivalent to 500 million people streaming a high-definition video continuously.
Over 60% of the traffic will be video, broken down as follows:
Interestingly the report tackles the topic of possible changes to the asymmetric bandwidth status quo:
With the exception of short-form video and video calling, most forms of Internet video do not have a large upstream component.
As a result, traffic is not becoming more symmetric as many expected when user-generated content first became popular. The emergence of subscribers as content producers is an extremely important social, economic, and cultural phenomenon, but subscribers still consume far more video than they produce. Upstream traffic has been flat as a percentage for several years, according to data from the participants in the Cisco VNI Usage program.
It appears likely that residential Internet traffic will remain asymmetric for the next few years. However, there are a number of scenarios that could result in a move toward increased symmetry.
• Content providers and distributors could adopt P2P as a distribution mechanism. There has been a strong case for P2P as a low-cost content delivery system for many years, yet most content providers and distributors have opted for direct distribution, with the exception of applications such as PPStream and PPLive in China, which offer live video streaming through P2P, and have had great success. If content providers in other regions follow suit, traffic could rapidly become highly symmetric.
• High-end video communications could accelerate, requiring symmetric bandwidth. PC-to-PC video calling is gaining momentum, and the nascent mobile video calling market appears to have promise. If high-end video calling becomes popular, this will move traffic toward symmetry again.Generally, if service providers provide ample upstream bandwidth, applications that use upstream capacity will begin to appear.
Ofcom Report: Fiber capacity limitations in access networks
In Januray 2010 analysys mason delivered a report Fibre capacity limitations in access networks to UK Internet regulator Ofcom.
The report, full of technical detail, and with very useful appendices of acronyms and a glossary, concludes that, in the short to medium term, fiber could handle double the predicted traffic. What’s more economies of scale and the implementation of photonic integrated circuit (PIC) technology. As new services become available and providers are forced to upgrade point-to point (PTP) networks would be easier to upgrade than passive optical networks (PON), because in a PTP network there is no passive (or active) equipment in the field and users can be upgraded individually. PON networks (such as FIOS) are cheaper to build than PTP, however operational issues regarding upgrades could prove to be a significant bottleneck, which could, in the worst case, prevent them from being upgraded at all.
