<<Telecom industry may be left severely overbuilt after rush to
add 'bandwidth' capacity
By Peter J. Howe, Globe Staff, 07/10/99
f Mark Bruneau is right, tens of billions of dollars worth of stock
market investment in information-highway communications networks
runs the risk of going up in smoke.>>
Ludicrous. This person doesn't really include bandwidth multipliers in his "forecast" of future bandwidth demand.
1) On the web site I help administer, user session traffic is up 4-fold in the last nine months to six figures, with bytes requested per month up 16-fold during the same nine months. And we have only 1 per cent of our imaged inventory on the site in the form of compressed 2D JPEGs. How much more product could we sell if we could send a short video of each of 120,000 items, on request ? How much additional bandwidth will that require, times the millions of web businesses out there with digital assets. Does a software company have a better chance to sell its product via a net download of 25 minutes, or 10 seconds? Can we have too much bandwidth ??
2) SSL/encryption - what percent of total public Internet traffic is now encrypted? Very little. How much will be encrypted ? Hmmmmmm. E-commerce, VPNs, etc., I would venture to say large amounts. SSL transactions vs. non-SSL transactions currently degrade Apache server capacity by a factor of 50 or more, and definitely mean exponentially more packets coursing the fiber in the future.
3) The dreaded 30 fps video on demand.
4) As exponentially faster edge connections for users are rolled out to the entire net surfing population, exponentially more throughput will be needed in the core.
5) VoIP - will this really work unless there is massive over-provisioning of bandwidth? It would be impossible to produce non-latent voice in an environment rife with packet collisions, which is what we have now (and there are very few IP voice packets sent currently on the web).
6) Price/demand elasticity - cheaper bandwidth available in larger quantities ? Mr. Market says cheaper, faster bandwidth means more users, more packets requested/sent, more bandwidth needed.
7) One computer per 100 people on earth. Do you think there is a chance that this ratio may go up :~) Multiply all of the above multipliers by this multiplier.
Can the transactional processes of the web ever be made too fast for business? Will we be there two years from now ?
Am I selling my LU stock based on Mr. Bruneau's assesment?
No.
jww |
