Cisco’s latest Visual Networking Index, this one focusing mobile data traffic, projects 108% compound growth through 2014.
“HD”Tube: YouTube moves toward 1080p
YouTube is moving toward a 1080p Hi Def video capability, just as we long-predicted.
This video may be “1080p,” but the frame-rate is slow, and the video motion is thus not very smooth. George Ou estimates the bit-rate at 3.7 Mbps, which is not enough for real full-motion HD. But we’re moving quickly in that direction.
Two-year study finds fast changing Web
See our brief review of Arbor Networks’ new two-year study where they captured and analyzed 264 exabytes of Internet traffic. Highlights:
- Internet traffic growing at least 45% annually.
- Web video jumped to 52% of all Internet traffic from 42%.
- P2P, although still substantial, dropped more than any other application.
- Google, between 2007 and 2009, jumped from outside the top-ten global ISPs by traffic volume to the number 3 spot.
- Comcast jumped from outside the top-ten to number 6.
- Content delivery networks (CDNs) are now responsible for around 10% of global Internet traffic.
- This fast-changing ecosystem is not amenable to rigid rules imposed from a central authority, as would be the case under “net neutrality” regulation.
GigaTube
YouTube says it now serves up well over a billion videos a day — far more than previously thought.
Jackson’s traffic spike
Om Malik surveys the Net traffic spike after Michael Jackson’s death:
Around 6:30 p.m. EST, Akamai’s Net Usage Index for News spiked all the way to 4,247,971 global visitors per minute vs. normal traffic of 2,000,000, a 112 percent gain.
Bandwidth Boom: Measuring Communications Capacity
See our new paper estimating the growth of consumer bandwidth – or our capacity to communicate – from 2000 to 2008. We found:
- a huge 5,400% increase in residential bandwidth;
- an astounding 54,200% boom in wireless bandwidth; and
- an almost 100-fold increase in total consumer bandwidth
U.S. consumer bandwidth at the end of 2008 totaled more than 717 terabits per second, yielding, on a per capita basis, almost 2.4 megabits per second of communications power.
Netflix and Web video
We’ve been talking about Netflix’s sure move to the Web for a long time now. In our presentations, we show how Netflix DVDs that today mostly arrive in the U.S. mail, if sent in high-def (HD) over the Net, would total almost eight exabytes per year. That’s almost half of all U.S. Internet traffic in 2008.
Well, here’s CEO Reed Hastings in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal:
Netflix Inc. is a standout in the recession. The DVD-rental company added more subscribers than ever during the first three months of the year. Its stock has more than doubled since October.
But Netflix’s chief executive officer, Reed Hastings, thinks his core business is doomed. As soon as four years from now, he predicts, the business that generates most of Netflix’s revenue today will begin to decline, as DVDs delivered by mail steadily lose ground to movies sent straight over the Internet. So Mr. Hastings, who co-founded the company, is quickly trying to shift Netflix’s business — seeking to make more videos available online and cutting deals with electronics makers so consumers can play those movies on television sets.
His position offers a rare look at how a CEO manages a still-hot business as its time runs out. “Almost no companies succeed at what we’re doing,” he says.
Getting the exapoint. Creating the future.
Lots of commentators continue to misinterpret the research I and others have done on Internet traffic and its interplay with network infrastructure investment and communications policy.
I think that new video applications require lots more bandwidth — and, equally or even more important, that more bandwidth drives creative new applications. Two sides of the innovation coin. And I think investment friendly policies are necessary both to encourage deployment of new wireline and wireless broadband and also boost innovative new applications and services for consumers and businesses.
But this article, as one of many examples, mis-summarizes my view. It uses scary words like “apocalypse,” “catastrophe,” and, well, “scare mongering,” to describe my optimistic anticipation of an exaflood of Internet innovations coming our way. I don’t think that
the world will simply run out of bandwidth and we’ll all be weeping over our clogged tubes.
Not unless we block the expansion of new network capacity and capability. (more…)
Bandwidth caps: One hundred and one distractions
When Cablevision of New York announced this week it would begin offering broadband Internet service of 101 megabits per second for $99 per month, lots of people took notice. Which was the point.
Maybe the 101-megabit product is a good experiment. Maybe it will be successful. Maybe not. One hundred megabits per second is a lot, given today’s applications (and especially given cable’s broadcast tree-and-branch shared network topology). A hundred megabits, for example, could accommodate more than five fully uncompressed high-definition TV channels, or 10+ compressed HD streams. It’s difficult to imagine too many households finding a way today to consume that much bandwidth. Tomorrow is another question. The bottom line is that in addition to making a statement, Cablevision is probably mostly targeting the small business market with this product.
Far more perplexing than Cablevision’s strategy, however, was the reaction from groups like the reflexively critical Free Press:
We are encouraged by Cablevision’s plan to set a new high-speed bar of service for the cable industry. . . . this is a long overdue step in the right direction.
Free Press usually blasts any decision whatever by any network or media company. But by praising the 101-megabit experiment, Free Press is acknowledging the perfect legitimacy of charging variable prices for variable products. Pay more, get more. Pay less, get more affordably the type of service that will meet your needs the vast majority of the time. (more…)
Net traffic update…
See two recent articles (here and here) addressing a topic I’ve done lots of research on: Internet traffic growth, mostly due to Web video, and the technology investment needed to both drive and accommodate it.
Here’s one of my papers:
Estimating the Exaflood – 01.28.08 – by Bret Swanson & George Gilder
Bandwidth and QoS: Much ado about something
The supposed top finding of a new report commissioned by the British telecom regulator Ofcom is that we won’t need any QoS (quality of service) or traffic management to accommodate next generation video services, which are driving Internet traffic at consistently high annual growth rates of between 50% and 60%. TelecomTV One headlined, “Much ado about nothing: Internet CAN take video strain says UK study.”
But the content of the Analysys Mason (AM) study, entitled “Delivering High Quality Video Services Online,” does not support either (1) the media headline — “Much ado about nothing,” which implies next generation services and brisk traffic growth don’t require much in the way of new technology or new investment to accommodate them — or (2) its own “finding” that QoS and traffic management aren’t needed to deliver these next generation content and services.
For example, AM acknowledges in one of its five key findings in the Executive Summary:
innovative business models might be limited by regulation: if the ability to develop and deploy novel approaches was limited by new regulation, this might limit the potential for growth in online video services.
In fact, the very first key finding says:
A delay in the migration to 21CN-based bitstream products may have a negative impact on service providers that use current bitstream products, as growth in consumption of video services could be held back due to the prohibitive costs of backhaul capacity to support them on the legacy core network. We believe that the timely migration to 21CN will be important in enabling significant take-up of online video services at prices that are reasonable for consumers.
So very large investments in new technologies and platforms are needed, and new regulations that discourage this investment could delay crucial innovations on the edge. Sounds like much ado about something, something very big. (more…)
Silicon Shift
Take a look at this 40 minute interview with Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of graphics chip maker Nvidia. It’s a non-technical discussion of a very important topic in the large world of computing and the Internet. Namely, the rise of the GPU — the graphics processing unit.
Almost 40 years ago the CPU — or central processing unit — burst onto the scene and enabled the PC revolution, which was mostly about word processing (text) and simple spreadsheets (number crunching). But today, as Nvidia and AMD’s ATI division add programmability to their graphics chips, the GPU becomes the next generation general purpose processor. (Huang briefly describes the CUDA programmability architecture, which he compares to the x86 architecture of the CPU age.) With its massive parallelism and ability to render the visual applications most important to today’s consumers — games, photos, movies, art, photoshop, YouTube, GoogleEarth, virtual worlds — the GPU rises to match the CPU’s “centrality” in the computing scheme.
Less obvious, the GPU’s attributes also make it useful for all sorts of non-consumer applications like seismic geographic imaging for energy exploration, high-end military systems, and even quantitative finance.
Perhaps the most exciting shift unleashed by the GPU, however, is in cloud computing. At the January 2009 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, AMD and a small but revolutionary start-up called LightStage/Otoy announced they are building the world’s fastest petaflops supercomputer at LightStage/Otoy’s Burbank, CA, offices. But this isn’t just any supercomputer. It’s based on GPUs, not CPUs. And it’s not just really, really fast. Designed for the Internet age, this “render cloud” will enable real-time photorealistic 3D gaming and virtual worlds across the Web. It will compress the power of the most advanced motion picture CGI (computer generated imaging) techniques, which can consume hours to render one movie frame and months to produce movie sequences, into real-time . . . and link this power to the wider world over the Net.
Watch this space. The GPU story is big.
