'Visual Networking' - the killer app threatened by the skills shortage

By Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 09 January 2008 04:48

Opinion and Analysis

Cisco CEO, John Chambers, has been reported telling journalists at CES 2008 in Las Vegas that video is the next killer app, and in particular, the combination of video and social networking, which Cisco has dubbed 'Visual Networking'. But the company has also flagged a shortage of networking skills as a major threat to progress. According to a report in VON Magazine   "Chambers said growth in broadband access and higher speeds and the lower cost of services are factors that make video the killer application on the network, driving network growth rates of 300 to 500 percent a year." (Presumably they mean traffic growth rates.)

At a presentation in Australia late last year, Optus' general manager, technology and planning, Peter Ferris, revealed that peer-to-peer traffic, almost exclusively video, soaked up more than 90 percent of the capacity on Optus' international Internet links during the night time, off-peak, period.

There is a discussion and a podcast on visual networking on Cisco's web site. In the discussion Ken Wirt, Cisco's vice president of consumer marketing, says: "The TV, the personal computer, and portable devices such as "smart" cell phones all now play an equal role in a consumer's visual networking experience. Most importantly, individuals don't want to choose between devices. They want them to work together to make it easy to access and use their favourite video and communications tools wherever they may be.

Wirt explains: "The appetite for all types of video from high definition TV programs and movies to the wide range of Internet content is exploding. During just one month in the United States last year, nine billion video streams were viewed over the Internet by 133 million people. And that is just the beginning. Over the next four years, the number of devices capable of playing networked video is projected to increase 17-fold. But on the flip side of all of that interest in video is the unavoidable fact that it is a very demanding medium. The most demanding. We consider video 10 times more complex to run over a network than audio. So Cisco and other consumer electronics companies have their work cut out for them."