Prepare for a bandwidth explosion
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Futures, Networking on
I spent much of last week at Cisco’s CScape analyst event in San Jose. It was a fascinating few days, as it meant I got a very different look at a company that affects our online lives. I’ll write about the development of Cisco 3.0 as a collaborative company in another entry, but one thing caught my attention.
It was a simple slide in CEO John Chambers’ keynote presentation, one that showed that the amount of bandwidth that was going to be needed to deliver the next generation of internet services was going to quadruple by 2011, with the amount of data traveling over the global network measured in the tens of exabytes. That’s an awful lot of data - as one exabyte can be thought of as the total sum of human knowledge at the start of 2007.
I’m not sure if I agree with Chambers’ that most of this traffic will be streamed video (though friends of mine who run ISPs are looking at the video traffic on their networks with some concern), but there’s certainly going to be a lot of video traffic streaming through the networks. It’s probably not going to all be telepresence running at multiples of HD, but there’s certainly a place for high quality video conferencing.
Where I can see video coming in useful is in delivering snippets of explanatory content over mobile phones. There’s a lot to be said for a quick movie showing just what’s gone wrong and where if you’re debugging a business process. There’s even more to be said for a video showing just how to make something work that little bit better. Suddenly a snippet of video becomes a resource that needs to be seen by lots of people - and that needs to be stored and shifted around a network.
One of the speakers at the event, telepresenced in from London, was the BBC’s Erik Huggers, who heads up the future media team. He noted that the BBC is already pushing out 1.3 petabytes of data a month, much of it audio. However he’s expecting that to increase by 500 TB a month by the end of the year, with the iPlayer launching on December 25. That’s not the end of his predictions - he expects things to ramp up to 3PB a month very quickly, with the BBC delivering 5PB a month by the end of 2008, which is what the BBC is designing its network to support.
Understanding the requirements of your network a year from now may seem to be taking the belt and braces a little too far, but are you on top of your network traffic - and its growth rates? If video starts becoming more and more part of the way you work, is your network ready?
It’s time to get out the monitoring gear and start looking at just what traffic your network is carrying - and how its changing. You may get a shock…
–Simon
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