cost of doing business

Mon Apr 18 18:48:06 UTC 2005

>> fwiw, 100mb to the home costs about that in japan
>
>
>
> We are talking of two different things here, traffic versus access 
> bandwidth.
> It will be a while before the average household generates 5 megabit/s 
> traffic.
> Even in Korea and Hong Kong, where the average broadband link is in the
> 5-10 Mbps range, average traffic is about 0.1 Mbps.  The main purpose of
> high speed links is to get low transaction latency (as in "I want that Web
> page on my screen NOW," or "I want that song for transfer to my portable
> device NOW"), so utilizations are low.
>

For those of us that are already running triple play architectures and 
working on the data analysis related to the bandwidth usage growth (in my 
case over the last 18 months and adding services one after the other) I see 
this with a different light:

I fully agree with the transaction latency syndrome, people are compulsive 
customers that want to buy right now and you (as a service provider) want to 
see to them purchase the service before they change their mind, just need to 
look at the ringtones market to see how much people are willing to spend 
within seconds for a piece of music they will replace in a few days/weeks 
with their next favorite tune from the charts that marketing is feeding them 
with.

Where I don't agree is on the bandwidth usage analysis, once you add the IP 
based TV/VOD* services you will be carrying close to 5Mbps on average on 
your network in the near future. Either for the one of the TV channels 
(currently the market is talking about 2 concurrent TV channels down the 
same pipe to an end user's home in the North American model or 1 for the 
European) or the VOD. So agreed this is not Internet traffic but you will 
need to carry it beyond your access termination device (DSLAM/CMTS/ Ethernet 
switch) since the economics of the IPTV/VOD market and (current?) technical 
scalability will prevent you from being able to have a the full IPTV/VOD 
streaming (= unicast and/or multicast in this case) in each POP to keep the 
traffic as local as possible. So anyhow within your metro area network 
accessing and aggregating the customers the amount of bandwith required to 
service all customers will grow quite a bit with IPTV/VOD services.

IMHO (of course)
Thomas

*Triple play IPTV/VOD = IP packets carrying a video signal using (name your 
favorite format) either as unicast or multicast stream. This excludes the 
current hybrid HFC networks that still provide digital TV via an HF stream 
using (insert your favorite standard here) and the Internet access and voice 
service over IP.  Anyhow they will migrate once DOCSIS 3.0 and the wideband 
benefits have been marketed to all the cable operators as the "next big 
thing" they need to have and hence run an IP only service for all the triple 
play services. 