Bandwidth scarcity: myth or reality?
On Friday, Bob Cringely posted a provocative column about the growth of carriers leveraging Wi-Fi hotspots saying, “These games are played over and over by communication service companies of all kinds, and at the heart of it all is a big lie — that bandwidth is scarce. Bandwidth is not scarce.” His argument centered on the fact that “America and the world are bound by more fiber that is dark than is lighted. If backbones needed to be 10 times larger than they currently are, they quickly could be. On a local basis, the cost of provisioning a 1.5-megabit, 6-megabit, or 24-megabit DSL connection is essentially the same to the ISP, meaning the ‘bigger’ pipes are vastly more profitable and that’s all.”
With all due respect to the estimable Mr. Cringely, available fiber is not the limiting factor for bandwidth. Yes, there is a great deal of dark fiber available since carriers had the foresight to put in many more strands of fiber than they needed in the short term (considering the huge cost of digging a hole and pulling a cable through a conduit or stringing a cable on poles, to not do so would be exceedingly foolish). But fiber in the ground does not equal bandwidth. Dark fiber is unusable until it is “lit up,” which requires that space and power be found, equipment be ordered and installed (how much? where? when?), and circuits connected. That just sets up the “pipes.” Now add the IP or Ethernet routers (how many? where? when?) and configure the network to provide high QoS routes where necessary (how many? where? when?). Now, don’t forget to hook everything up to the back-end fault and performance management OSSs and tell the provisioning systems they are ready for service. Whew! There is a tremendous investment of time and resources necessary to transmute dark fiber into bandwidth.
And that’s just today. As bandwidth-intensive services such as video continue to grow and gobble up bandwidth (at anywhere from 10-17x the bandwidth cost of legacy services), we’ll all be amazed at how fast that dark fiber is used up.
Bob’s comments were particularly timely for me as I am at the IEC’s Broadband World Forum Europe in Berlin this week. Today, I had the pleasure of hearing Stephan Scholz, CTO of Nokia Siemens, speak. One of his predictions was that broadband users worldwide would grow from 1 billion today to 5 billion by 2015. He also predicted a traffic increase of more than 100x by 2015! In another speech, Berit Svendson, VP and Head of Nordic Fixed at Telenor, reported that they are experiencing a doubling of traffic every year - much of it coming from a 20% annual growth in broadband customers and a 40% annual increase in bandwidth usage by existing broadband customers, mostly due to the growth in video.
Not only is bandwidth scarce, it’s going to become more so.
