Factors Boosting Bandwidth Demand Growth

Still citing Telegeography, the following are factors accelerating bandwidth demand growth:

• Increased adoption of high-speed broadband access (more than 400 mn broadband subscribers worldwide at 2008E)
• (Illicit) P2P usage --> case TPB
• Legal video content --> skyrocketing!!

Hulu had 9 million unique viewers in October 2008, rumored to be going international soon
Most sporting events are broadcast online to a global audience in increasingly high quality
Beijing Olympics:100 million online viewers in China according to CCTV; The BBC served 40 million streams

Traffic Trends

Comparing the latest Ipoque's Internet-Study to previous traffic composition published e.g. by Telegeography; I see only a minor difference: P2P is still the king but video traffic has an increasingly dominant portion.

Traffic trends according to A. Oon (Equinix) at Menog :

• Accelerated growth in broadband services in Asia
• Major content providers & CDN deployment in Asia: Yahoo, Google, Akamai, Limelight
• Localized content growth
• 10G exchange deployments
• Continued exponential growth in P2P Traffic
• HD streaming video and VoIP
• Mass market gaming

Global Internet Usage - 2008

Some notes from TM's perspective with regard to the Internet usage:

Asian Bandwidth Growth : Demands, Supplies & Facts

This will highlight and shall actually be a summary of the talk given by Bill Barney / Pacnet several times ago.

Several facts happened in Asia:

• 41% of the world’s fixed line users
• More than 40% of the world’s mobile users : Number of subscribers in Asia has grown from 280m to more than 950m between 2003-2007 (GSMA, ITU, Frost & Sullivan); More than 210 million users have signed up for 3G services in Asia since the launch of the first high-speed mobile network data network in Korea in 2000 (CDMA Development Group)
• 38.7% of the world’s Internet subscribers: Growth (2000-2007) at 346.6%, compared to the rest of the world at 228.1%
• Over 42% of the world’s broadband Internet users: The number of broadband connections in Asia nearly quadrupled between 2003-2007 (27.3m to 100.5m); 128m out of world’s 350m broadband subscribers are in Asia. (Buddecom)
  

Those things are enforced among other by the following key drivers:

Can Broadband Spread to the Masses?

In this post, I just want to archieve some facts and opinions given by Arjun Trivedi (NSN-Nokia Siemens Networks) in the first Indonesian Broadband Summit held last April in Jakarta. The title above is taken from Arjun Trivedi's slides, since to my opinion, that title describes the most important message from his presentation. (I was not attending this event and just found his presentation material through a link referred from Mastel website). But don't forget to balance the question with "Where are the Masses?" :-)

Some facts/statistics as of end 2007 (source UN, Ovum, ITU, BIS Sharapnel, Operators, NSN Market Intelligence):

Broadband : Penetration & Pricing

There might be several definitions for the term "broadband". Here I use this term to refer to services which run on channels / infrastructures other than those utilized by traditional voice services. Usually it should be faster than 64 kbps. Practically it denotes services using xDSL, FTTx, Cable/HFC or novel state-of-the-art wireless technologies. Some numerical data presented in this post are taken from Point Topic and REACH. Those are actually rather outdated (2004). But some characteristics concluded from those might remain similar and could be used as an approximation for our current situation.