Fiber Works with Exponential Growth
The Pots and Pans blog article, The Law of Accelerating Returns, points out:
… The FCC recently set the new definition of broadband at 25 Mbps. When I look around at the demand in the world today at how households use broadband services, this feels about right. But at the same time, the FCC has agreed to pour billions of dollars through the Connect America Fund to assist the largest telcos in upgrading their rural DSL to 15 Mbps. Not only is that speed not even as fast as today’s definition of broadband, but the telcos have up to seven years to deploy the upgraded technology, during which time the broadband needs of the customers this is intended for will have increased to four times higher than today’s needs. And likely, once the subsidy stops the telcos will say that they are finished upgrading and this will probably be the last broadband upgrade in those areas for another twenty years, at which point the average household’s broadband needs will be 32 times higher than today.
Wait, the FCC is planning for linear growth? We’re seeing accelerated growth, so in seven years’ time, as the article points out, we’ll be using 32 times more bandwidth than today. A couple of stats will help illustrate this. What uses bandwidth?
- Videos.
- 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.
- Half of YouTube views are on mobile devices (cellular or Wi-Fi data). (YouTube statistics)
- Top YouTube creators were found to be more popular than mainstream celebrities among U.S. teenagers (Variety)
- Netflix accounts for about 36.5% of peak downstreaming network traffic. (Sandvine)
- Encrypted Traffic.
- Netflix’s recent decision to encrypt their traffic will result in over two-thirds of North American Internet traffic being encrypted in 2016.
- YouTube is the largest source of encrypted traffic in North America, and still a significant contributor of unencrypted traffic. (Sandvine)
Our fiber loop is already prepared for the increase in traffic. We’re ready to increase speeds when you are.