How Long Will 40 Gbps, 100 Gbps Networks Last?

The problem with networks is that they do not last as long as they used to, which means they need to be upgraded more frequently, which also means the ability to raise capital to upgrade the networks is a bigger issue than it once was.

Qwest CTO Pieter Poll, for example, notes that Qwest's bandwidth growth now is 45 percent growth compounded annually, or nearly doubling every two years or so. That in itself is not the big problem, though. The issue is that consumers driving most of that new consumption do not expect to pay more for that consumption increase.

"From my perspective, the industry really needs to focus on tracking down cost per bit at the same rate, otherwise you'll have an equation that's just not going to compute," says Poll. Whether on the capital investment or operating cost fronts, adjustments will have to be made, one concludes.

Still, raw bandwidth increases are not insignificant. "If you look at 2008 for us it was unprecedented in terms of the work we did in the backbone," says John Donovan, AT&T CTO. "The capacity we carried in 2008, five years out, will be a rounding error.

Donovan notes that AT&T's 2 Gbps backbone lasted 7 years, the10 Gbps backbone lasted five years, while the 40 gigabit will last three years.

By historical example, one wonders whether 100-Gbps networks might last as little as two years before requring upgrades.

Donovan suggests carriers will have to rethink how they design networks, how routing is done and how content bits get moved around. One suspects there might be more use of regional or local caches, to avoid having so many bits traverse the entire backbone network.

Level 3 Sues Limelight Networks

Level 3 Communications has filed a patent infringement suit against Limelight Networks, alleging that Limelight's content delivery network infringes four Level 3 patents.

The filing cits patents 6,185,598; 6,473,405; 6,654,807 and 7,054,935, according to Dan Rayburn, streamingmedia.com EVP. Level 3 says it notified Limelight of the potential violations in February 2007, but that Limelight did not redesign its network to avoid infringing.

Given the notification by Level 3 and lack of response by Limelight, one has to assume Limelight thinks it is not infringing.

These days, it does not seem to be enough to have the right assets, people, channels, partners and technology. One often has to own intellectual property as well, if only to use as bargaining chips for cross licensing.

Hardware and software suppliers have known this for years. What is new is that service providers have to do the same.

Level 3 Attacks CDN Pricing

Level 3 Communications has been gearing up for a major assault on the content delivery networks business and appears ready to price such services at a rate that basically offers caching and downloading services for no more than the cost of buying IP transport. If, as expected, Level 3 prices content delivery at the same price as Ip transit, it could disrupt much of the market.

It isn't so much the disruption of profit margins: that already is happening as several dozen contestants now are slugging it out for some share of the growing market.

The bigger issue is how participants in the media, hosted applications and enterprise end user markets are able to change the way they do things if enhanced quality becomes an integral part of the IP transport they buy.

Level 3 hopes to have its streaming services ready by mid-November. At that point it will have a wider shot at disrupting the market for transport of real time services. Right now much of the market is focused on video content. But there are other real time applications and services that really would benefit from lower-priced and more capable delivery over networks that eliminate jitter and latency over the global wide area network.

Access networks on each end still are issues, but tail circuits also keep improving. As more applications move to "cloud-based" processing and storage, they will have to start having the "feel" of local desktop apps. CDNs will be part of that experience. And that's where the major impact will lie.