Thursday, November 4, 2010

Two Hours a Day of HDTV Per User Will Require 548 Times More Access Bandwidth

Akamai President David Kenny says that in five years the average user will consume two hours a day of high-definition video. To accommodate this insatiable demand, the Internet will need to increase capacity 548 times from where it is today.

That could have all sorts of implications. People might have to pay much-higher fees for bandwidth. People might refuse to pay, and limit their consumption of HD video. People might decide linear delivery and on-demand consumption (store and forward) actually provides high value at reasonable cost, and wind up watching most of their HD video on linear services that have digital video recorder features.

Application providers or service providers might come up with new ways of alleviating the bandwidth necessary to consume on-demand video. Advertising might wind up being a lot more important than it is today. Or all of the above, and other steps, might have to be taken.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I really doubt it. Akamai operates a CDN, so they in many ways the exact amount of bandwidth available to them is quite different. Akamai is peered with most ISPs, and has servers colocated right on various access providers networks. I work at an ISP and we have both.

Cable operators have a problem, and it is the same problem. The access network is shared, so you can't handle too many continuous 5Mbps HDTV dreams before your shared pipe is gone. At at just 35Mbps data capacity per cable channel, you will need a lot of channels.

DSL providers will fair better, as long as their loops can handle the 5Mbps minimum for a single HDTV stream. But most DSL providers own their own fibre between their DSLAMs, so they can add bandwidth easily. 10Gbps Ethernet has really fallen in price.

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