Bandwidth Now Driven by Consumers

"About 85 percent of carriers want Ethernet intelligence embedded into the optical transport network," says Meriton Networks chief network architect Nick Cadwgan. 

In some cases that means the ability to create Ethernet tunnels through an optical network, so that the transmission fabric starts to become a service delivery fabric. 

In some cases, though, it remains important to transport TDM traffic through the optical fabric, as in the case of wireless backhaul, notes Emanuel Nachum, ECI Telecom executive. "You want to integrate TDM, SONET and Ethernet layers as part of the optical infrastructure," he says. And though it has gone unnoticed in some quarters, dramatic changes in transport bandwidth are starting to occur. 

There's a move to 1 gigabit Ethernet at the edge of the network, in part because that's what the cards now support," says Umesh Kukreja, Atrica executive. "Enterprise sites now are pushing 20 Mbps to 40 Mbps while data centers are putting in 10 Gbps links. "We're also seeing N by 1 Gbps paths carried within 10 Gbps wavelengths.

But there's an even bigger change going on. Historically, bandwidth demands were driven by business. 

From this point forward, they will be driven by consumer demand for IPTV and other applicatons. Cadwgan says that over the last 18 months the demand drivers have flip flopped and that telco requirements for consumer video, using IP transport, now are the single greatest bandwidth driver.

Even for service providers who serve small, medium or enterprise customers, there are key implications. Paramount among the changes are new buyer benchmarks for what bandwidth should cost. 

SureWest Communications, for example, offers a symmetrical 50 Mbps Internet access service for customers who take a premium bundle including unlimited wireless, wireline and premium video. On a sum of the parts basis the symmetrical 50 Mbps works out to something like $200 a month. When those consumer users go to their offices, they are going to wonder why their business bandwidth costs so much.

Likewise, even some independent telephone companies serving rural areas on a suburban fringe are planning now for residential access bandwidth in the 40 to 50 Mbps range, with a 10 Gbps "metro core" to support it. You might wonder whether this is "overkill." Not if the telco plans on delivering IPTV services. And executives also acknowledge that if competing cable operators start bonding channels to create 100 Mbps services, then there will have to be a competitive response.

All of which puts telcos and other service providers in an awkward position. Competitors are driving consumer bandwidth expectations and delivery, not the voice and data networks that used to be expected to provide such leadership.