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April 30, 2009

Wireless is Key for Broadband Access Demand and Supply

By Gary Kim
Contributing Editor

People sometimes disagree about how fast the Internet is growing, and whether there is any significant danger we will "run out of bandwidth."
 
One area that supposedly is contested is the actual volume of traffic flowing over the global backbones, especially now that video is becoming more popular. Professors of Mathematics at the University of Minnesota often is quoted as saying backbone traffic growth is in the 50 percent to 60 percent annually.
 
Researchers at TeleGeography say bandwidth is growing at a 54-percent rate in the United States, about 52 percent annually in East Asia and about 61 percent annually in Europe. Growth is faster in the "developing" regions. Eastern European bandwidth growth is 83 percent, Latin America is growing 100-percent annually, while Middle East consumption is growing at 90-percent annual rates. South Asia traffic is growing at 97-percent annual rates.
 
Video is a wild card, but TeleGeography notes that 78 percent of all traffic is Web, peer-to-peer or streaming traffic, and a majority of all that traffic is video. Video, in other words, already drives global traffic. Executives at Hibernia Atlantic (News - Alert), for example, simply say that trans-Atlantic bandwidth "is video."
 
Still, researchers at Nemertes Research have raised hackles in some quarters by arguing the Internet will be a capacity wall as early as 2010. What some miss is that Nemertes researchers say that could happen in the access network, not the backbone network. Nobody thinks global backbone bandwidth will fail to keep pace with underlying demand, as it is relatively easy to upgrade bandwidth on the backbones.
 
The problem is upgrades of the access network. Some therefore see wireless broadband as the new wildcard. It is possible new demand will be created for the backbones. On the other hand, wireless broadband might simply largely be a substitute for wired broadband.
 
If so, wireless solves the access infrastructure problem.
 
That said, Nemertes is not incorrect in noting that bandwidth demand on the backbones is increasing 100 percent annually. It is, but only in some regions. Nor is Nemertes incorrect in noting that wired broadband supply increases linearly, obviously posing some risk if access demand grows non-linearly.
 
Again, wireless is the wildcard. New broadband wireless capacity can be turned up much more quickly than wired broadband can. And wireless access, though logically increasing backbone demand somewhat, also substitutes for some amount of wired access.
 
The other angle is that the Opera Mini browser uses compression that reduces raw bandwidth consumption by an order of magnitude.
 
So far, history and experience suggest a 60-percent annual rate of backbone growth is reasonable. Also, average demand and peak demand are issues. But so far, the difference between peak and average ranges between three percent and six percent, according to TeleGeography.
 
Access, as always, is the issue, not likely the backbones. Adding servers, switches and capacity on the long-haul parts of the network is, relatively speaking, affordable and fast. Access always has been the issue, and on both the demand and supply sides of the access equation, wireless seems poised to have a huge impact.
 
That likely is true both for the larger mobile broadband space as well as for the issue of getting broadband out to rural and isolated locations. Though it tends not to get much attention (like it or not, satellite is a niche), wireless also is a cost-efficient to get broadband to many rural and isolated locations very quickly.
 
Terrestrial WiMAX (News - Alert) networks including, but not limited to, Clearwire and Open Range Communications, as well as satellite providers such as WildBlue and HughesNet, can play useful roles. WiMAX will offer higher bandwidth, but still does not have national coverage. The satellite networks have national coverage, but only operate up to about 5 Mbps.
 
But in either case, a relatively small investment in customer premises equipment can get broadband access to people fast. Don’t worry about the backbones; access always is the bottleneck.
 
 

Gary Kim (News - Alert) is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Gary’s articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Stefania Viscusi


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