UK data traffic drives demand through the roof

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The UK’s communications market is experiencing a huge increase in data traffic, putting major demands on networks, says Guy Matthews

The UK telecoms market is important both as a hub for European and global traffic, and as a large and still developing sector in its own right.

Only a few years ago, an explosion in available network capacity looked to have outpaced demand, leading to fears of a glut that would last for decades. That glut is already history, with demand for capacity growing year on year thanks to data-hungry consumer and enterprise applications.

Users of communications networks are demanding not only more capacity to meet their ever growing needs, but a better quality of service as well. To compete successfully in this market, service providers need offer high bandwidth connectivity over next-generation networks, as well as a portfolio of value-added services.

What’s next?

So what are some of the applications driving the country’s unprecedented need for high quality, high bandwidth network capacity?

In the business world, companies in sectors like financial services, insurance and law have to face not only the demanding expectations of customers but of regulators also, meaning they need to be sure that the large amounts of data they manage daily get sent over highly secure networks.

Many such organizations are ensuring their survival in the event of a disaster, such as a flood or terror attack, by running a redundant network in a remote location and mirroring data between the two. For others, a move to IP telephony is creating new patterns of network traffic.

Media and broadcast companies also face pressures to deliver rich content with practically zero downtime. And sectors like education and the public sector, which have not been traditional customers of high bandwidth services, are also getting in on the act. Health authorities for example are upgrading to higher connection speeds in order to make medical records available speedily over a wide area.

Changes in the relationship between workers and the workplace are also having a major knock-on effect on data traffic. The demand for more flexible hours and the added financial cost and environmental impact of endless travelling to and from work and meetings is creating the era of the home worker.

Such workers may be imposing fewer demands on public transport and roads, but they are adding hugely to the amount of rich data flying over VPN links and high bandwidth connections. In a similar way, the video conference, where executives meet each other digitally over a wide area, is taking the place of flying from city to city.

But it’s not just UK businesses and major public organizations that soak up increasing amounts of bandwidth with data-heavy applications – far from it.

Consumers in the home are arguably, between them, an even bigger driver of capacity demand than businesses. As the Internet enters its so-called second phase, phenomena like social networking and sites like Facebook and YouTube mean that people expect to be able to download large amounts of online video content at will, and not be made to wait for it – or even to pay a premium for the privilege of using such a powerful resource.

Tomorrow’s capacity demand from both consumers and enterprises will be driven even further as more and more of the applications that we enjoy at home or in the office get taken out on the road.

The UK’s mobile operators are bracing themselves to cope with a new wave of mobile content as next generation services enable more and more demanding applications to be accessible on the move. Their backhaul needs alone demand significant investment as they plan the network capacity they will need to run this content over their network backbone.

Before mobile content really takes off there are the issues of quality, reliability and pricing that must be addressed, but these are simply details that must be dealt with by network operators and not inhibitors of demand.

As an indication of the impact of this demand, just consider that although mobile TV is presently only accessible by a tiny minority of devices, it is already accounting for up to 50 per cent of the data traffic on some mobile networks.

Such facts offer an insight into just how demanding tomorrow’s rich applications will be on the communications networks whose job it is to carry them.

Boxout: Some predictions for UK data traffic growth

• Consumer Internet data consumption will outpace business consumption by 2008
• Growth in internet traffic will double every two years until 2011
• Peer-to-peer traffic, from sites like Napster and Kazaa, will more than quadruple from 649 petabytes per month in 2006 to 2,836 petabytes per month in 2011
• Internet video streaming and downloads will grow from 9% of all consumer Internet traffic in 2006 to 30% in 2011
• Internet video-to-TV will increase by more than a factor of ten from 2007 to 2011
• Internet video-to-PC will increase by a factor of four up to 2011

Source: Cisco