Make the most of YouTube while you can: before the great bandwidth famine.

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by Stuart Corner

Sunday, 13 July 2008

! A new study forecasts that demand for Internet bandwidth will grow by an order of magnitude in five years, straining current network architectures to the limit. Related stories Microsoft IE8 Beta 2 released: the web browser for jerk-offs? Giving identity thieves and hackers the big finger – protect yourself! Google Gears up Safari support Chef serves up food ad network Reddit blames black holes for downtime The study "World bandwidth growth over the next decade – is it viable? "  was authored by David Payne of the Institute of Advanced Telecommunications, Swansea University in the UK and sponsored by CIP Technologies, a UK provider of photonics products, technical services and consultancy. CIP's CTO, David Smith, said: "The Global Bandwidth Study demonstrates that current telecom networks will be unable to cope with the scaling demands for bandwidth. A step-change in technology is needed that can not only deliver this bandwidth demand at economic cost but also significantly reduce the amount of energy required to power and cool it. "The current technology will be physically too large and energy-hungry to deliver the levels of bandwidth growth demanded by users. CIP believes that photonic integration will be increasingly the way forward to provide the step change cost reduction per unit bandwidth necessary to economically meet projected demand." Payne said that the increasing demands in recent months were the beginning of a massive requirement for additional bandwidth as the use of online video and data services increases. "Based on a range of service scenario models, it is clear that demands for bandwidth will continue to put increasing pressure on existing network infrastructures. By 2018, assuming that this capacity is made available by the operators; usage could grow to 40 to 100 times the levels seen in networks today. "However it is difficult to see how operators can economically grow existing network architectures to meet this demand, and further consideration of the types of networks and the technology deployed is required if they are to ensure profitability." There is light at the end of the tunnel. The photonic switching technology developed by the University of Sydney has the potential to increase the Internet's ability to switch and route traffic by several orders of magnitude beyond today's electronic switches and routers, and use much less power. However its some years from commercialisation and transmission technologies will need to keep pace with the forecast bandwidth demands. CIP is not alone in making predictions of order of magnitude growth in bandwidth demand Cisco has available a couple of very comprehensive white papers setting out its methodology and forecasts for traffic growth: "Global IP Traffic Forecast and Methodology, 2006–2011" and "The Exabyte Era." Cisco's growth predictions are even more aggressive than CIP's study. Cisco predicts that in three years time, Internet video traffic will be twenty times what it was in 2006 and that as a result, video, Internet traffic will quadruple by 2011, when online video will generate one billion DVDs worth of traffic each month. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to post your comment! Tags See All Tags Internet  Photonics  Stuart Corner  Get stories like this delivered daily - FREE - subscribe now

 

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